The best armed forces on the planet?

Russia is now the most powerful country on the planet. (…) the Russian armed forces are probably the most powerful and capable ones on earth (albeit not the largest ones) (…) Russia is the most powerful country on earth because of two things: Russia openly rejects and denounces the worldwide political, economic and ideological system the USA has imposed upon our planet since WWII and because Vladimir Putin enjoys the rock-solid support of about 80%+ of the Russian population. The biggest strength of Russia in 2017 is a moral and a political one, it is the strength of a civilization which refuses to play by the rules which the West has successfully imposed on the rest of mankind. And now that Russia has successfully “pushed back” others will inevitably follow (again, especially in Asia).

While some dismissed this as rather ridiculous hyperbole, others have asked me to explain who I can to that conclusion. I have to admit that this paragraph is somewhat ambiguous: first I make a specific claim about the capabilities of the Russian military, and then the “evidence” that I present are of a moral and political nature! No wonder that some expressed reservations about this.

Actually, the above is a good example of one of my worst weaknesses: I tend to assume that I write for people who will make the same assumptions I do, look at issues the way I look at them, and understand what is implied. My bad. So today I will try to spell out what I mean and clarify my point of view on this issue. To do this, however, there are a number of premises which I think need to be explicitly spelled out.

First, how does one measure the quality of an armed force and how can armed forces from different countries be compared?

The first thing which need to immediately get out of the way is the absolutely useless practice known as “bean counting”: counting the numbers of tanks, armored personnel carriers, infantry combat vehicles, artillery pieces, aircraft, helicopters and ships for country A and country B and come to some conclusion about which of the two is “stronger”. This is utterly meaningless. Next, two more myths need to be debunked: high tech wins wars and big money wins wars. Since I discussed these two myths in some detail elsewhere (here) I won’t repeat it all here.

Next, I submit that the purpose of a military force is to achieve a specific political objective. Nobody goes to war just for the sake of war and “victory” is not a military, but a political concept. So yes, war is the continuation of politics by other means. For example, the successful deterrence of a potential aggressor should be counted as a “victory” or, at least, as a successful performance of your armed forces if their goal was to deter. The definition of “victory” can include destroying the other guy’s armed forces, of course, but it does not have to. The British did win the war in the Malvinas/Falkands even though the Argentinian forces were far from destroyed. Sometimes the purpose of war is genocide, in which case just defeating a military forces is not enough. Let’s take a recent example: according to an official statement by Vladimir Putin, the official objectives of the Russian military intervention in Syria were to 1) stabilize the legitimate authority and 2) create conditions for a political compromise. It is undeniable that the Russian armed forces fully reached this two objectives, but they did so without the need for the kind of “victory” which implies a total destruction of your enemies forces. In fact, Russia could have used nuclear weapons and carpet bombing to wipe Daesh, but that would have resulted in a political catastrophe for Russia. Would that have been a “military victory”? You tell me!

So, if the purpose of a country’s armed forces is to achieve specific and political objectives, this directly implies that saying that some country’s armed forces can do anything, anywhere and at any time is nonsense. You cannot access a military outside a very specific set of circumstances:

1) Where: Space/geographical

2) When: Time/duration

3) What: political objective

Yet, what we see, especially in the USA, is a diametrically opposite approach. It goes something like this: we have the best trained, best equipped and best armed military on earth; no country can compete with our advanced stealth bombers, nuclear submarines, our pilots are the best trained on the planet, we have advanced network-centric warfare capabilities, global strike, space based reconnaissance and intelligence, we have aircraft carriers, our Delta Force can defeat any terrorist force, we spend more money training our special forces than any other country, we have more ships than any other nation, etc. etc. etc. This means absolutely nothing. The reality is that the US military played a secondary role in WWII in the European theater and that after that the only “kinda victory” it achieved is outright embarrassing: Grenada (barely), Panama (almost unopposed). I would agree that the US military was successful in deterring a Soviet attack, but I would also immediately point out that the Soviets then also successfully deterred a US attack. Is that a victory? The truth is that China also did not suffer from a Soviet or US attack, does that mean that the Chinese successfully deterred the Soviets or the Americans? If you reply ‘yes’ then you would have to accept that they did that at a fraction of the US costs, so whose military was more effective – the US or the Chinese one? Then look at all the other US military interventions, there is a decent list here, what did those military operations really achieve. If I had to pick a “least bad one” I would reluctantly pick the Desert Storm which did liberate Kuwait from the Iraqis, but at what cost and with what consequences?!

In the vast majority of cases, when the quality of the Russian armed forces is assessed, it is always in comparison to the US armed forces. But does that make sense to compare the Russian armed forces to a military which has a long record of not achieving the specific political objectives it was given? Yes, the US armed forces are huge, bloated, they are the most expensive on the planet, the most technology-intensive and their rather mediocre actual performance is systematically obfuscated by the most powerful propaganda machine on the planet. But does any of that make them effective? I submit that far from being effective, they are fantastically wasteful and amazingly ineffective, at least from a military point of view.

Still dubious?

Okay. Let’s take the “best of the best”: the US special forces. Please name me three successful operations executed by US special forces. No, small size skirmishes against poorly trained and poorly equipped 3rd world insurgents killed in a surprise attack don’t qualify. What would be the US equivalent of, say, Operation Storm-333 or the liberation of the entire Crimean Peninsula without a single person killed? In fact, there is a reason why most Hollywood blockbusters about US special forces are based on abject defeats such as Black Hawk Down or 13 hours.

As for US high-teach, I don’t think that I need to dwell too deeply on the nightmares of the F-35 or the Zumwalt-class destroyer or explain how sloppy tactics made it possible for the Serbian Air Defenses to shoot down a super-secret and putatively “invisible” F-117A in 1999 using an ancient Soviet-era S-125 missile first deployed in 1961!

There is no Schadenfreude for me in reminding everybody of these facts. My point is to try to break the mental reflex which conditions so many people to consider the US military as some kind of measuring stick of how all the other armed forces on the planet do perform. This reflex is the result of propaganda and ignorance, not any rational reason. The same goes, by the way, for the other hyper-propagandized military – the Israeli IDF whose armored forces, pilots and infantrymen are always presented as amazingly well-trained and competent. The reality is, of course, that in 2006 the IDF could not even secure the small town of Bint Jbeil located just 2 miles from the Israeli border. For 28 days the IDF tried to wrestle the control of Bint Jbeil from second rate Hezbollah forces (Hezbollah kept its first rate forces north of the Litani river to protect Beirut) and totally failed in spite of having a huge numerical and technological superiority.

I have personally spoken to US officers who trained with the IDF and I can tell you that they were totally unimpressed. Just as Afghan guerrillas are absolutely unanimous when they say that the Soviet solider is a much better soldier than the US one.

Speaking of Afghanistan.

Do you remember that the Soviet 40th Army who was tasked with fighting the Afghan “freedom fighters” was mostly under-equipped, under-trained, and poorly supported in terms of logistics? Please read this appalling report about the sanitary conditions of the 40th Army and compare that with the 20 billion dollar per year the US spends on air-conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq! And then compare the US and Soviet occupations in terms of performance: not only did the Soviets control the entire country during the day (at night the Afghan controlled most of the country side and the roads), they also controlled all the major cities 24/7. In contrast, the US barely holds on to Kabul and entire provinces are in the hands of the insurgents. The Soviets built hospitals, damns, airports, roads, bridges, etc. whereas the Americans built exactly nothing. And, as I already mentioned, in every interview I have seen the Afghans are unanimous: the Soviets were much tougher enemies than the Americans.

I could go on for pages and pages, but let’s stop here and simply accept that the PR image of the US (and Israeli) military has nothing to do with their actual capabilities and performance. There are things which the US military does very well (long distance deployment, submarine warfare in temperate waters, carrier operations, etc.) but their overall effectiveness and efficiency is pretty low.

So what makes the Russian armed forces so good?

For one thing, their mission, to defend Russia, is commensurate with the resources of the Russian Federation. Even if Putin wanted it, Russia does not have the capabilities to built 10 aircraft carriers, deploy hundreds of overseas bases or spend more on “defense” than the rest of mankind combined. The specific political objective given to the Russian military is quite simple: to deter or repel any attack against Russia.

Second, to accomplish this mission the Russian armed forces need to be able to strike and prevail at a maxial distance of 1000km or less from the Russian border. Official Russian military doctrine places the limits of a strategic offensive operation a bit further and include the complete defeat of enemy forces and occupation of his territory to a depth of 1200km-1500km (Война и Мир в Терминах и Определениях, Дмитрий Рогозин, Москва, Вече, 2011, p.155) but in reality this distance would be much shorter, especially in the case of a defensive counter-attack. Make no mistake, this remains a formidable task due to the immense length of the Russian border (over 20’000km of border) running over almost every imaginable type of geography, from dry deserts and mountains to the North pole region. And here is the amazing thing: the Russian armed forces are currently capable of defeating any conceivable enemy all along this perimeter. Putin himself said so recently when he declared that “We can say with certainty: We are stronger now than any potential aggressor, any!” I realize that for a mostly American audience this will sound like the typical garden variety claptrap every US officer or politician has to say at every public occasion, but in the Russian context this is something quite new: Putin had never said anything like that before. If anything, the Russian prefer to whine about numerically superior their adversaries seem to be (well, they are, numerically – which every Russian military analyst knows means nothing).

Numerically, the Russian forces are, indeed, much smaller than NATO’s or China’s. In fact, one could argue for the size of the Russian Federation, the Russian armed forces are rather small. True. But they are formidable, well-balanced in terms of capabilities and they make maximal use of the unique geographical features of Russia.

[Sidebar: Russia is a far more “northern” country than, say, Canada or Norway. Look at where the vast majority of the cities and towns in Canada or Scandinavia are located. Then look at a map of Russia and the latitudes at which the Russian cities are located. The difference is quite striking. Take the example of Novosibirsk, which in Russia is considered a southern Siberian town. It is almost at the same latitude as Edinburgh, Scotland, Grande Prairie, Alberta or Malmö in Sweden]

This is why all the equipment used by the Russian Armed Forces has to be certified operational from temperatures ranging from -50C to +50C (-58F to 122F). Most western gear can’t even operate in such extremes. Of course, the same also goes for the Russian solider who is also trained to operate in this range of temperatures.

I don’t think that there is another military out there who can claim to have such capabilities, and most definitely not the American armed forces.

Another myth which must be debunked is the one of western technological superiority. While it is true that in some specific fields the Soviets were never able to catch up with the West, microchips for example, that did not prevent them from being the first ones to deploy a large list of military technologies such as phased-array radars on interceptors, helmet-mounted sights for pilots, supercavitating underwater missiles, autoloaders on tanks, parachute deployable armored vehicles, double-hulled attack submarines, road-mobile ICBMs, etc. As a rule, western weapon systems tend to be more tech-heavy, that is true, but that is not due to a lack of Russian capabilities, but to a fundamental difference in design. In the West, weapon systems are designed by engineers who cobble together the latest technologies and then design a mission around them. In Russia, the military defines a mission and then seeks the simplest and cheapest technologies which can be used to accomplish it. This is why the Russian MiG-29 (1982) was not a “fly-by-wire” like the US F-16 (1978) but operated by “old” mechanical flight controls. I would add here that a more advanced airframe and two engines instead of one for the F-16, gave the MiG-29 a superior flight envelope. When needed, however, the Russians did use fly-by-wire, for example, on the Su-27 (1985).

Last but not least, the Russian nuclear forces are currently more modern and much more capable than the comparatively aging US nuclear triad. Even the Americans admit that.

So what does that all mean?

This means that in spite of being tasked with an immensely difficult mission, to prevail against any possible enemy along the 20’000+km of the Russian border and to a depth of 1000km, the Russian armed forces have consistently shown that they are capable of fulfilling the specific political objective of either deterring or defeating their potential enemy, be it a Wahabi insurgency (which the western pundits described as “unbeatable”), a western trained and equipped Georgian military (in spite of being numerically inferior during the crucial hours of the war and in spite of major problems and weaknesses in command and control), the disarmament of 25’000+ Ukrainian (supposedly “crack”) troops in Crimea without a single shot fired in anger and, of course, the Russian military intervention in the war in Syria were a tiny Russian force turned the tide of the war.

In conclusion, I want to come back to my statement about Russia being the only country which now openly dares to reject the western civilizational model and whose leader, Vladimir Putin, enjoys the support of 80%+ of the population. These two factors are crucial in the assessment of the capabilities of the Russian armed forces. Why? Because they illustrate the fact that the Russian soldiers knows exactly what he fights for (or against) and that when he is deployed somewhere, he is not deployed as a tool for Gazprom, Norilsk Nickel, Sberbank or any other Russian corporation: he knows that he is fighting for his country, his people, his culture, for their freedom and safety. Furthermore, the Russian soldier also knows that the use of military force is not the first and preferred option of his government, but the last one which is used only when all other options have been exhausted. He knows that the Russian High Command, the Kremlin and the General Staff are not hell-bent on finding some small country to beat up just to make an example and scare the others. Last but not least, the Russian solider is willing to die for his country and while executing any order. The Russians are quite aware of that and this is why the following circulated on the Runet recently:

Translation: under both photos it says “private of the US/Russian Army, under contract, deployed in a combat zone”. The bottom central text says “One of them needs to be fed, clothed, armed, paid, etc. The other one just needs to be ordered “this way” and he will execute his mission. At any cost”

At the end of the day, the outcome of any war is decided by willpower, I firmly believe that and I also believe that it is the “simple” infantry private who is the most important factor in a war, not the super-trained superman. In Russia they are sometimes called “makhra” – the young kids from the infantry, not good looking, not particularly macho, with no special gear or training. They are the ones who defeated the Wahabis in Chechnia, at a huge cost, but they did. They are the one which produce an amazing number of heroes who amaze their comrades and enemies with their tenacity and courage. They don’t look to good in parades and they are often forgotten. But they are the ones which defeated more empires than any other and who made Russia the biggest country on earth.

So yes, Russia currently does have the most capable armed forces on the planet. There are plenty of countries out there who also have excellent armed forces. But what makes the Russian ones unique is the scope of their capabilities which range from anti-terrorist operations to international nuclear war combined with the amazing resilience and willpower of the Russian solider. There are plenty of things the Russian military cannot do, but unlike the US armed forces, the Russian military was never designed to do anything, anywhere, anytime (aka “win two and a half wars” anywhere on the planet).

For the time being, the Russians are watching how the US cannot even take a small city like Mosul, even though it had to supplement the local forces with plenty of US and NATO “support” and they are unimpressed, to say the least. But Hollywood will surely make a great blockbuster from this embarrassing failure and there will be more medals handed out than personnel involved (this is what happened after the Grenada disaster). And the TV watching crowd will be reassured that “while the Russians did make some progress, their forces are still a far cry from their western counterparts”. Who cares?

The Saker

The Essential Saker II: Civilizational Choices and Geopolitics / The Russian challenge to the hegemony of the AngloZionist Empire

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The author(s) of this blog are deliberately minimizing the repercussions that the IDF/AF have caused over the Russian-made S-400 and S-300 air defence systems currently deployed in Syria: Israeli warplanes were able to penetrate with total impunity over Syrian airspace while avoiding detection and causing significant damage to the installations of a military airport located in the outskirts of Damascus last week (01/13/2017).

Most likely Israel has already found the S-400/S-300’s Achilles heel and now, they are in a perfect position to start a major war in partnership with the Arabs against Iran (an operator of S-300).

The myth of “invincibility” of the Russian-made air defence systems has effectively been debunked by the State of Israel (and a true embarrassment to Putin’s plans for the Middle East indeed).

Do you really think that was not deliberate from the Russians, simple SAM’s could have taken care of those air assets, and if they did not it is for another reason. Probably diplomatic and political, but also strategic.

Be assured when the systems are deployed on automatic defence mode, they would have made their job. That is the only reason Israelis penetrated, because someone decided not to respond, since no Russian assets were targeted, you do remember that those systems are deployed to protect Russian assets and infrastructure only right?

In the situation in Syria, the politics of the situation means they can not put the systems on automatic. There are two many planes flying around. And they can’t afford to automatically shoot down the wrong planes. That could start world war III.

And, just thinking out loud, the same factors could be how the Israelis are beating the systems. Perhaps they make their planes look like USAF to the sensors? Just a thought.

Russia has never set such insane goals as the United States. At the beginning of the operation goal was to refract the course of events. To and troops were deployed. And the rest as you probably already noticed, we are quite capable of being done in its territory thousands of miles from the site of the conflict.
The goal reached and sent their heroes home to their families. They also need to rest.

So in syria s400 is deployed not to help support and protect syrian assets but only russian assets ?
What an ally rusdia is !!
Is that why Putin has said twice mission accomplished- in Feb 2016 and in December 2016 ? With syria still fighting with terrorists saved by lavrov’s ceasefires ?

@ Colman,
i think you are wrong.
israelis with F35 launch Popeye missiles from israeli airspace. they never entered Syrian airspace. it is less from 80 km to Damascus. Syria retaliated with ground to ground rockets and hit israeli air base from where F35 take off. so, syrians knew where F35 came from. they hit Hatzor airbase at night 14.01.2017. it is story like when russians hit ~30 NATO “cavemen”.

“Israeli warplanes were able to penetrate with total impunity over Syrian airspace while avoiding detection and causing significant damage to the installations of a military airport located in the outskirts of Damascus last week (01/13/2017).”

That attack, in support of daesh and al qaeda, was launched from inside israel. The the israeli planes don’t enter Syrian air space, but launch stand off munitions from the air space of israel or Lebanon, where they can’t be positively identified as being an attacker until the missiles have already been released and are on their way to their targets. These attacks are very typical of the cowardice and duplicity inherent in the israeli military, regime and society in general.

Not one Israeli plane has overflown Syrian airspace since the S400s have been in place.

Reports of “bombs” are false.
The strikes against Syrian and Hezbollah stores of weapons have all been missile strikes, launched from standoff positions off-shore or on the Israeli side of Golan.

Little David likes to think it can operate with impunity in the region.
It asks permission of Russia, it does not challenge Russia.
Russia is now a regional power that controls what air space over Syria it wants to.

Coordination is an imperative. The US does coordination for fear it will make a move that could cost them their planes and pilots.

The bad reporting, poor terms of description have led people to report strikes that fit an agenda.

Israel does not enter Syrian air space.

In Aleppo artillery strikes were reported as Russian air strikes.
There’s a lot of very bad, amateur and fake news reporting in Syria.

Read carefully and watch the sources.

If Israel could penetrate S 400 defenses, Obama would have ordered a total blitz of Russia.

The fact is the US doesn’t even have the key to penetrating the old S300 defenses.

Facts matter.

Israel is now diminished. Bibi went to Moscow three times in one year to deal with Putin. Who’s in Charge? The beggar or the Tsar?

Just to add a point. Turks fly only with Russian permission.
In fact today the Turks joined with the RF air force in strikes against ISIS in Aleppo Province.

Remember, most reporters can’t operate in Syria. This is the end result of the ISIS and other radicals kidnapping and beheading reporters. This made sure that there were no experienced, western reporters working in Syria. Thus, they are stuck with taking the reports that come from the combatants, and then writing the articles and tv reports that say what their editors and publishers want them to say.

Israelis have glide bombs (Spice 250) capable of reaching Damascus from launch points possibly within Israel, and certainly from within the Occupied Golan. Their aircraft do not need to enter Syrian airspace to defend their takfiris between the Golan and Damascus.

That military airport your referring to was hit by ground-to-ground missiles, not airplanes.

You are totally wrong. Actually its the opposite. Coalition and also Israeli war jets are said to experience total cockpit black-outs over Syria due to Russia sophisticated electronic warfare measures. The Russians turn on the systems for one minute at a time, then shut it off, so the Israelis and Americans cant lock on, hack or figure out how they are doing this.

If Israel decides to get suicidal and launch major war in the region, these electronic warfare measures will be turned on for an indefinite period of time. The poor pilots wont be able to fly, thus crashing and burning.

U.S. and Israeli military intelligence are going ape-shit because they cant figure this system out.

Its one of the reasons Netanyahu(and his entourage) went to Russia, hat in hand, to persuade the Russians to relax these measures. I’m sure the Russians told the Israeli’s to get back on the fuckin plane and go home.

Russians know, through their bloody history who the enemies are. Things don’t look too good for the IDF (who are mostly exchange students from Brooklyn , New York; and stand no chance against the now distilled down hard core Hezbollah, Syrian Arab Army and Iraqi Shiite militias.) in a future conflict, and believe it, it will come.

This is important intelligence info and helps explain why Putin is so sure of himself in any military confrontation with USA. However there does not seem to be much evidence of this. Nor can I find any of the U.S.S. Donald Cook incident you mention below.

I do not doubt the technology (Keshe stuff, for example). Nor do I doubt that Russian forces are equipped with it. Nor do I need to know for sure. (I believe.) But what are the sources, if I may ask.

The same electronic warfare measure I mentioned was used on the U.S.S. Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea late last year.

A couple of Russian Su-24’s disabled the entire systems of the ship and proceeded to simulate attack runs on the ship, which was in effect a sitting duck. There’s video out there on this. The Americans still cant figure out the technology used.

When the Donald Cook got back to its port, some 10-15 sailors just flat-out broke down and were resigned. I’m sure the laundry on the ship had heaps of dirty underwear too.

This is true. Russia had their own “Roswell” and has back engineered several technologies including shutting down ANY war craft using COPPER wiring. A certain frequency at the right power shuts down the electric circuit. This is why ALL…repeat ALL Aircraft Carriers are in AMERICAN ports right now, and likely to STAY there for some time. This frequency could also be used to disable the electronics on some missiles, but there MUST be some time and also using it TOO MUCH might give away that secret of how they actually can do this.

And yes, ALL the sailors RESIGNED from the Donald Cook incident and had to swear secrecy about the incident.

America will break itself by all the SECRETS of the Bureaucracy of the “Intelligence” and “Military” Complex like Eisenhower warned America about.

And after SNOWDEN leak, there is no more “sources and methods” to keep secret anymore within America…those who are AWAKE know this, but the $$ elite 1% still think they can Rule the World…they can’t even close missile silo doors. ROFLMAO. https://mycommonsenseparty.com

Your malicious claim can be debunked by the simple fact that there is only 30 km from Damasks to the Lebanon border, and only 50 km to the israhelli-controlled Golan heights. Meaning, zionazis can strike Damasks without having to enter the Syrian airspace.

The Anglo-Zionists inhabit a sidereal universe.
I love watching them clutch at imaginary straws.
It can only get worse, now that Zuckerberg and Soros will be deciding how much ‘truth’ the proles need to be drip-fed on internet. They have been in charge of MSM, through the CIA, since 1975.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

@Colman, hmm… let me throw an anecdote at you, which I suspect you have never heard.
Some people have a saying, which loosely translated says “Let the fox f$$k you for the sake of the eagle”. The eagle in this saying has a name “stavraetos” and you can see it here:http://stavraetos.blogspot.ca/
As a point of interest, this eagle is a symbol of Evxinus Pontus (today occupied by Turkey)
Roman Legions used it, as well two-headed version was a symbol of Byzantium which toady is a symbol of Russia.
I hope you get the point why no defenses were engaged against this Israeli provocation.

IDF fought no one of importance. Arab armies make poor opposition and IDF was pathetic against Hezbollah just 10 years ago.
Israel is even not on the same page as Russia whose military track record is second to none.
You really made me laugh. it must be some joke?

No Israeli warplanes entered Syria airspace. Missiles were fired either from the ground or from planes. Not something the S300 or 400 were designed to take down. ICBM or cruise missile it should be able to. With a Pantsir S2 they might have had a chance, which Syria owns, more are being delivered.

You couldn’t ask for better examples of that than Cuba. After the Granma landing of the original 76 revolutionaries who disembarked only 12 were left 48 hours later, with one box of ammunition. All but three were wounded. Facing a 20,000 man US backed Batista army and Air Force with three intact and nine wounded soldiers, Fidel declared “Today we rest. Tomorrow we begin the liberation of Cuba.”

A little over two years later Batista fled as his disintegrating army and police deserted en mass in the face of continual defeats by the small but very motivated guerrilla army. Fidel, Che, Raul,and their comrades were motivated to fight and if necessary die for the liberation of Cuba, while the official army had little motivation to fight for the Mafia and the utterly corrupt Batista dictatorship.

Exactly the same moral superiority enabled the enormously out-numbered and out-gunned National Liberation Front (NLF) of southern Vietnam to defeat an occupying American army with over half a million US troops assisted by various “Allies” like Australia, Southern Korea, the Philippeans, and a “South Vietnamese” army of around a million men. Despite committing every war crime in the book and using every technological superiority available to them from WW II battleships with 16 inch guns to genocidal B-52s which dropped 60 – 500lb bombs per plane per trip, dropping overall more bombs on that tiny country than all sides in WW II put together, the US lost the war and suffered the humiliation of evacuating the US embassy in Saigon by helicopter as Vietnamese bullets whistled past. The Vietnamese were motivated to free their country from the grip of French and US Imperialism, while the US draftees just wanted to get home alive and get back to surfing and hanging out at the local hamburger joint. Vietnamese courage trumped US technology.

The 1983 US invasion of Grenada offered another example. A tiny force of Cuban construction workers building the runway for a new International Airport held off thousands of US Marines for three days. They were armed only with some AK-47s supplied by the Grenadian government. There was no Grenadian army and the small Grenadian militia force had only two armoured cars and around 100 AK-47s, most of which they gave to the Cubans who were the only people on the island with any military training. Faced with US bombers, naval artillery, helicopter gunships, and heavy tanks the tiny contingent of Cuban construction workers who had been instructed to defend the airport held out until ordered to cease-fire by an agreement worked out whereby the US would repatriate the survivors to Cuba. It was probably the most one-sided example of utter courage and determination blocking an overwhelming military force since 300 Spartans held off the Persian army of Xerxes at the mountain pass of Thermopylae in 480 BC. The US invasion force numbered about 8,000 men, without considering the naval and air force elements involved in invading a tiny island with about 90,000 inhabitants and no standing army or defense installations.

So yes, the Saker is very much correct that morale, determination, and a readiness to fight to the death against overwhelming odds are more important in the long run than numbers and technology.

Your choice of examples are two of my favorite examples of the futility of American military doctrine and tactics. Now we add the factor of broken or missing morale which exemplifies American military.

Their is no reason a patriotic American would fight in these foreign wars of regime change and hegemony just because a President says its about human rights and democracy.

The US might do better with a Foreign Legion under their banner. No cognitive dissonance.

They have tried it with CIA special forces contracted with PMCs. That hasn’t worked either.

They have tried it with proxy armies. That hasn’t worked either.

Why?

Because on the other side, morale has always been higher. People fighting for their national identity and sovereignty, religion, language, natural resources.

You can bring a nazi, a Wahhabi, a NATO spec op, a merc, a psychotic of whatever origin.

If they are facing a patriot, they will need a 10:1 advantage to succeed.
So, it is highly unlikely, American military will ever again be supreme.

It starts wars, is not threatened existentially by their chosen enemy, and thus, nothing is patriotically at stake.

They thought superior training and technology would give their troops morale. It hasn’t worked.

Trump understands this instinctively. He intends to withdraw from such ventures after ISIS is destroyed.

He was watching fake and misleading ‘news’ that got him to think about enlisting in the first place.
Then, American military recruiters are massive liars and con-men who only care about meeting their quotas of fresh meat signed up for the military.
Then, the US military’s biggest propaganda operation is aimed at its own soldiers.

An example, most US service people serving in Iraq thought they were getting revenge on 9-11. There were reports of pictures of the burning twin towers painted on the walls of the mess halls. Never mind that Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11, and no Iraqis were involved in the attack.

So, its no surprise at all that after all of these lies and manipulations, that the American ‘doughboys’ don’t know why they are fighting. And then its no surprise that morale drops so low that the only thing they care about is getting home, and if that means gunning down a bunch of civilians for ‘their safety’, then that’s what they do. Then they come home and become police officers and apply the same low morale, training and methods to American citizens.

To Chinese, our definition of good time is storage overflow with food, no need to lock the door at night, many different ideas flourish, friends come to visit and trade from all directions, and peace within and at borders. Of cause all those are backed with a strong army to protect the country and trades…:-)

J, I think the Russians are learning this i.e. to live in peace. The days of the aggressive Russian bear gobbling up territotry are well in the past, I think. They are configuring their armed forces for defence. Although I think that aspiring to occupy enemy territory to a depth of 1,200Km to 1,500Km may both miscommunicate their intentions as well as a bit beyond their capabilities given modern circumstances. Against the Central Asia Stans maybe. But against the Europeans? I doubt both the capability and political wisdom of even aspiring to such a capability.

The real life comparison is in Syria-Iraq.
It is evident that since Oct. 2015 until the present, the US has not performed well, especially since it commands a coalition of 62 nations, uses 5-7 NATO nations with whom they have deep training and coordination, and have backed 100,000 “rebels” for five years.

In comparison, the Russians have been highly effective. Amazing impact with small force structure with enormous effect on the battle space.

The US has been ineffective at fighting AQ, fighting ISIS, or fighting the Syrian Army.

And in Iraq, the Iranian Shiite Militias have fought to the gates of Falluja for that victory to take place. And they fought to the gates of Mosul for that advance to take place. In other words, the US-backed forces would not have retaken Falluja without Iran’s military assets. And Mosul, in spite of the Kurds, was a non-starter without the Iranian assets.

The US military has been at odds with CIA-backed efforts and that may be a factor in Syria. But what’s the excuse in Iraq?

They have none. They are a military failure in Iraq and the final fall of Mosul will not be soon.

Then there’s Afghanistan. An utter disaster even with enormous assistance from NATO countries and logistical assistance from Russia.

The US lacks military leadership at the highest levels, at its doctrines and at its military leadership educational academies.

And because it is weak and rotten at its higher echelons, it manufactures and arms with the wrong weapons systems.

It will take 7-10 years to get things straight. If they persist in trying to build a military to contain China and diminish Russia, they will never get things right.

Russia will be better still in 7-10 years. And China will be armed to defeat any containing forces the US could dream up.

Why the US would still be trying to play the role of unipolar, global hegemon is really a challenge to answer. Twenty-five years of filling that role has brought nothing but disaster and wasted 50 Trillion dollars

In fact the next five years budgets call for 5+ Trillions for defense.
They would be better off just printing up the money, bind it tightly, put it on pallets and drop it out the back of C-130s on the damn headchoppers below.
ISIS and AQ and the Taliban will be suffocated in the mountainous piles of dollars. And a much smaller carbon footprint for those who think climate change is all man-made.

Possibly because some people have made and continue to make huge fortunes from all of this burn through of wealth.
Once one host is hollowed out from within, it is discarded. A new champion — throughout history — always arises to become infected with the disease of dreams of empire. I am afraid we are doomed to repeat this viscious cycle, until this planet, it’s life, it’s peoples… becomes so chewed up and degraded that no host capable of projecting power and having that mad glint of empire in their eyes, can arise from the ash heap of the earth that will remain… after the reign of homo rapiens!

The answer lay in the US deep state’s military-industrial complex (USIMC). They need to make profits and for that they need wars, more wars, endless wars, any war for whatever cause that can be presented as US interests. If Trump fails to rein in the USIMC, expect US-led, inspired, instigated wars to continue.

Actually its more sicker than that. The quest for global domination has been propagated by a certain tribe, or race if you will for the last 2000 + years. Its based on a perverted ideology of supremacism and exclusivity and of ‘chosen-ness’.

The rather new marriage between international Jewry and Evangelical Christianity(Christian Zionism) is most dangerous indeed.

That’s why these people are so desperate as of late for global war; because they see themselves as almost succeeding in global subjugation and domination, but mighty Russia(and China) stand in the way.

For 16 years now, the U.S. military cant overcome a bunch of guys in flip-flops and bedsheets in Afghanistan, armed with only assault rifles.

Ever wonder why the U.S. military has the highest suicide rate by leaps and bounds in the entire world? Because when soldiers are told to go fight for a elusive cause they cant, or don’t believe in, it confuses them and they get Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and deep depression takes hold. Many take up heroin and alcohol and beat their family and pets.

I personally know of one such individual. Used to be the happiest guy in school. Killed himself. Now he is at peace.

Russian military personnel, always, always know what they are fighting for; and as Saker said. That’s the crucial difference.

The chief difficulty US forces have is President Obama. He is concerned with domestic politics, not military operations.

He pulled all American troops from Iraq at the first opportunity as a personal vendetta against his predecessor George W. Bush, and because his supporters demanded it. Then, when the serious consequences of his short-sighted stupidity became evident (exactly as he was warned) he was adamant that the US would not have “boots on the ground” because that would be admitting that he was wrong to withdraw American troops from Iraq in the first place.

Obama has no understanding of war or expectation of victory. He actually boasted a recent interview that he is the only president in US history to be at war all 8 years of his administration, then went on to say he was proud that he had devised a “sustainable” war strategy – as if dragging a war out as long as possible without ever winning it is an accomplishment to be proud of!

Don’t mistake the armies Obama has fielded for a good effort at anything other than the most minimal efforts to appease domestic political opinion.

Knowing the sort of venal and dissolute man Obama is, I am sure he takes sexual pleasure ordering drone strikes. He feels very manly, sitting like a Roman Emperor in the Colosseum giving thumbs up or thumbs down to the photographs displayed before him.

The U.S. military’s serious problems predate Obama by decades, albeit Obama could have done far more to overcome them. We must keep in mind that the U.S. military has not won a major war since World War II. Stalemate in Korea, defeat in Vietnam (I was there), the ongoing disaster of Afghanistan, the ongoing disaster in Iraq, all testify emphatically that the U.S. does not do a good job of choosing which wars to fight and/or how to fight them.

One need only contrast the relative successes of the American approach (foreign wars to maintain and expand an empire created by coercion and the sword) with China’s (building prosperity at home and abroad) to grasp that U.S. national leadership suffers from severely blinding astigmatism. That is, unless one were to assume that winning wars is not the goal, that filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex is instead.

WW2 is more or less split into two theatres: mostly ground war in Europe and mostly naval.aerial war in Asia

Within Asia US Navy and AirForce displayed great capabilities, however there was few large ground operations. Small islands were took by decisive storms. But Japan mainlands were not. Japanese capitulation was prompted not by nukes alone but also by a huge USSR ground offensive in Japan-occupied China. Would USSR refrain from it we would probably have to see US Marines trying to occupy the whole Japan, and we can only wonder today what the performance would be. There was Iwojima but there also was Cottage.

Within Europe… There were impressive Air Force fits like Drezden. There was obliteration of Third Reich navy. Sorry, but ground battle of Allies were less than impressive. USSR strikes kept bursting German balloon, forcing them to remove units from Western front and consequently shrinking it down and down.

So, i just fail to see any different pattern than today. USA has impressive NAvyu and Aerial capabilities and suboptimal (to say it polite) ground capabilities.

Why the US would still be trying to play the role of unipolar, global hegemon is really a challenge to answer. Twenty-five years of filling that role has brought nothing but disaster and wasted 50 Trillion dollars

Disaster? wasted? – Not from the perspective of the enablers and beneficiaries of the policy into whose pockets the ‘wasted’ $50T very largely went.

And so it has always been with the question that dare not speak its name in either Russia or the West.

However , Globally, the U.S. and its Jewish managers are loosing the plot when it comes to hearts and minds.

The internet has done this. That’s the whole reason for the ‘Russian hacking’ pulp-fiction and ‘fake news’ masquerade.

Once Trump is President, they will shut down many avenues of the world wide web that Americans (and western societies) have access to. They will say ‘we had to do this to prevent Russian(and maybe Chinese) hacking and also because of the danger of ‘fake news’.

Too many people in the west are ‘waking’ up, and this scares the shit out of the so-called ‘managers’.

Actually, the one thing that Trump voters shared is a complete distrust of the media and the propaganda system. The election very much split between people who believe CNN and supported Hillary and the people who’ve learned that CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc are all lying to them and don’t listen nor believe.

It will be interesting to see if Trump stays true to what he campaigned on, or if he and his cabinet of billionaires just decide to rob and rape their supporters just like Hillary and the Democrats.

If so, there’s going to be a lot of people who not only don’t believe the media but who are also going to be more sceptical of politicians next time around. And that won’t be pretty.

The difference in how technology is marshalled is quite profound. The US thinks that throwing money at anything, business, weapons, etc. will generate a positive outcome. It won’t as its a myth. This is a reason why US business ‘competitiveness’ is in decline. The US DOD has now entered the realms of the absurd by embracing the useless Silicon Valley innovation model. Developing weapons without technological insight into what technologies your competitors are using, developing, etc. will be a fail. A report on the JSF supports what The Saker has outlined. I read that they want to develop a new engine for it.

In my opinion the strength of the Russian Armed Forces comes from a deep loyalty to their culture. There is no doubt that Russia is plagued with it’s share of neocons and traitors but the vast majority of Russians are intensely loyal to Russia. They don’t wear this loyalty on their sleeves but it is patently obvious in the celebrations and remembrances.

The Victory Day Parade in Sevastopol in 2015 is a case in point. We were at the top of Lenina Street from 06:30 that day and by that time of that morning it was all we could do to get our vehicles down Bastiona Street to Ushakova Square. And we had a police escort. From that time until the parade started hours later there was a steady and massive stream of citizens and visitors going down Lenina who in the end lined Lenina from Ushakova Square to Naxhimova Square and the reviewing stands and wrapping all the way around and down Naxhimova Street to Lazarjeva Square and then up Velyka Morska Street to Ushakova Square again. It is estimated that 300,000 citizens lined the parade route and our vehicles looked like rolling flower shops by the time we got down to Naxkimova Square in the parade. At that time the population of Sevastopol Region was estimated to be 350,000, not counting the influx of visitors for the parade and celebrations.

It was the citizens of Sevastopol who during the troubles of early ’14 secured this city and region and it was the citizens of Sevastopol, not Russian Special Forces, who took and held the Krimea Rada Building in Simferopol after Right Sector said they would burn it to the ground after they were defeated in their riot at Rada Building. It was the citizens of Sevastopol who barricaded all the roads coming in to the city to prevent the Ukrainians from doing to Sevastopol what they promised to do. It was the citizens of Sevastopol who secured and protected the Sevastopol Rada Building and it was the citizens of Sevastopol who prevented Ukraine SBU from arresting A. Chalyi the Tuesday after the mass meetings in Naxhimova Square and it was the citizens of Sevastopol who escorted A. Chalyi up Lenina Street to SBU HQ for his ‘interview’ with SBU later that day. It was the citizens of Sevastopol who told SBU that if A. Chalyi was not produced outside SBU HQ when the ‘interview’ took longer than told that they would come in the building and take him out. It was the citizens of Sevastopol who broke the back of SBU in Sevastopol Region that day when SBU produce A. Chalyi in less than five minutes and from that day SBU was a laughing stock and they knew it. Who amongst you in your countries would have the stones to do what Sevastopol citizens did? Sevastopol is Russia, pure and simple.

It is the citizens themselves who make Russia what it is today and who make her army and navy the strongest in the world. They know their tasks and will perform their duties as ordered and as needed. This is a far cry from what I saw in US in ’14 and ’15 when I was there. Patriotism is looked down upon and in many instances denigrated as many of you Americans know. More is the pity for that.

Thank you, Auslander – that wonderful film about Crimea that was produced a while back in a series of segments online did show what you have described happened at the border and at the Rada Building.

It brings to my mind the incident often forgotten which happened at the time of 9/11 – the plane that went down in Pennsylvania instead of heading for a target in Washington,DC. Citizens were involved, a very few, and American citizens at that, in defeating a known enemy, the plane hijackers.

The Russian spirit is a newborn one strengthening under good leadership after years of suppression. That is how I think of the American spirit, as the Revolutionary war was fought by a very small militia against a superior well-entrenched British army. That spirit is most certainly as suppressed now as the Russian spirit was not so long past, historically speaking. Russia provides the example for the US to follow to reawaken its own natural spirit. We are different but in that we are the same.

Either that plane was shot down and the debris spread over a wider area, or more likely, that plane wasn’t there. Look at the photos from the “crash site.” No plane, nothing, just a hole in the ground and some burned grass. That’s not how a crash site of a passenger airliner looks like.

Auslander
Speaking for myself, as a former Swedish infantry reserve officer, under what conditions would I put on the uniform again? Who will I be defending? Who will I fight against?
I will fight for my potato patch, my family, people I know, against whomever would come to attack and destroy them, but I refuse to fight for raping migrants who gang rape women in wheelchairs, people who throw stones at ambulances or the migrant-judical-social system around them, people who despise my culture (our politicians and some migrants), Carl Bildt – the vassal of COFR, the clueless Swedish politicians as a whole…
Our MSM and many commentators are gung ho about the need to fight Russia … sorry, it is not 1985 anymore.

Do keep in mind here FkDahl that the adorable specimen of Carl Bildt was rapidly climbing the ladder to political stardom against a backdrop of rampant Swedish Russophobia back in the early 1980s. Case in point: Was chasing non-existent Soviet submarines, also in the very waterways of Stockholm, somehow “justified” ? To be blunt, Carl Bildt has always been a fraudster, provocateur, and an ardent Zionazi fifth columnist thriving on Russophobia and corporate crime (oil).

Anonymous,
Please don’t confuse the night-raiding bullies of the Seals -who defile the corpses of the people they kill- with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces.

The “Green Beret” was awarded by John F. Kennedy to the Special Forces as a “badge of courage, a mark of distinction, and a symbol of excellence”. The motto of the Special Forces is “De Oppresso Liber” Translation” “Free The Oppressed”. It was intended to deploy in small units to the fringes of civilization (We used to call them “the frontiers of freedom”.), to deploy without fanfare and to stay for an extended period of time. Beyond that, the daring missions and accomplishments of the S.O.G. (Study and Operations Group) were extraordinary force multipliers during the Vietnam War.

Saker is quite right: The U.S. Special Forces during my day (Vietnam) nor anytime since then, could have pulled of the Crimean operation. It was never organized to do anything like that. (I remain extremely impressed with that Spesnatz operation; and I hope that the U.S. military is studying it very intensely, with the intent of matching it someday.)

The motto of the Special Forces is “De Oppresso Liber” Translation” “Free The Oppressed”. It was intended to deploy in small units to the fringes of civilization (We used to call them “the frontiers of freedom”.)

The US Special Forces motto is laughably Orwellian.

In reality, the purpose of the American military in general is to Oppress and Exploit, which would be a more honest credo for the special forces to adopt.

A very good read is a book by Stan Goff, “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti”

Mr. Goff was a Sergeant in the Special Forces when they were sent into Haiti during the Bill Clinton Cigar and Blue Dress years. He gives a very good account of what he saw. There’s a striking difference between what he saw that needed to be done (and that he tried to do with his small group) and what the overall US military and some very racist, rightwing Special Forces types were doing all around him.

He’s also been an excellent writer ever since. You can find him at From The Wilderness.

The US are effective in instilling fear and respect on its adversaries. She uses a mind game over the years to build up a “fearsome” military that subdue nations thru fear of a huge stick so to speak. Whether that stick is for real or for show it does not matter. It is used as an instrument of policy winning the US hegemony over the minds of many countries..making it possible for others to do as US told them. In that way it is very effective. It is more of an imagery, like marketing. As such they will avoid actual confrontations with Russia for eg. prefering to hype up the build up to confrontations..sending tanks to Eastern Eu for eg and force Russia to act in a particular way they want…that seems to be the purpose of their military in my opinion…not for actual combat with an competent adversary like Russia… and they always win.nothjing is the same again after that.In this way, in political terms, the US military is very effective, in my opinion.(am not a fan of US ..).

The US’ most success is using soft war and prpoganda. It has been successful into brainwashing the other Western and non Western world through its holywood, media, “democracy”, innovations, etc. This is the reason many immigrants have been flocking to US’ door. These same immigrants have not been aware that it is the US foreign policy, helping dictators (useful idiots) of their native country that caused the immigrants aka refugee to flee and knocking the door of a “democracy” US. What is sad is that, the same immigrants who became now 1st or 4th generations pledge allegions to US feeling grateful for US embracing them, go back to destroy their ancestral lands (nations).

It is the US population that need to wake up because they are the product of other nations working for US Dictatorship itself which the immigrant US population ran away from in the first place.

Please emphasize “US populations are the product of other nations”. This is important because these citizens are destroying who they are/were before they became US citizens serving US dictatorship. Thank you

The real reason the U.S. can get away with what it has for so long is not its military; it America’s Dollar$ hegemony and monopoly as the only reserve currency to purchase oil. Every country needs oil, thus needs dollars, thus can come under sanctions if not obedient.

Right after WW2, the U.S. economy was 51% of the worlds wealth, with only 5% of the worlds population.

One of the reasons for sanctions on Russia today and China -South China Sea friction is to maintain dollar hegemony.

Take a look at the US Deir Ezzor operation currently underway.
1) Kerry surprisingly agrees to Lavrov, peace deal on Lavrov’s terms. This allows the US suficient cover to take out the critical defense points and ammo dumps at Deir Ezzor airport.
2) ISIS takes Palmyra to slow down or prevent SAA forces from pushing through to Palmyra when the main attack on Deir Ezzor takes place. The T4 air base was also an important object in the prep for Deir Ezzor but they did not succeed in that.
3) AQ cut off water to Damascus, tying up forces that could be used in an attempt to push through to Deir Ezzor.
4) large movement of US/NATO forces onto Russia’s borders so that Russia must retain a good reserve of forces in Russia, rather than mounting a major operation to relieve Deir Ezzor.

The US has large zombi forces of wahabbis and also some neo-nazi’s to do its fighting, not to mention its “allies”

How many actual US military forces have been used in the destruction of Syria and Libya for that matter?

Looking at what is involved in the Deir Ezzor operation Trump will be destroyed or somehow sidelined. Perhaps this major attempt to take Deir Ezzor is setting up the conditions so that Trump can be pushed into attacking Iran?

Lookng at the US planning and preparatory work that has gone into the attack on Deir Ezzor, which has put Russia in a very bad position, it may be best to never underestimate the enemy.

What looked like US confusion, infighting and vengeful vandalism, was in fact setting up the conditions for the destruction of the final Syrian government foot hold in eastern Syria.

What would the US Soldiers, Marines and Sailors be without air and artillery SUPPORT. Without any they get slaughtered, and are unable to manage primary mission parameters, even against adversaries that have no support at all, now imagine them against a trained adversary that has such support.

Unable to agree with the Saker on the grounds of knowledge, I agree with him completely based on comparisons and on a number of impressions acquired through the years. Impressions gleaned by observing, albeit on the surface, how the US military projects itself – notably the so-called upper echelon, but also some people I met who, on leaving the army, returned to civilian life .
The upper echelon, at least observing some notorious characters in the limelight, is arrogant – the unuttered assumption being that arrogance shows self-assurance. By and large they look but a specialized branch of political appointees, proud of their achievements, especially in crushing the army of third world countries.
Not even Vietnam taught the US Army a sense of reserve in their ostentatious self-assurance. The Pentagon papers make ironic reading, almost amusing, were it not for 2-3 million Vietnamese and 58 thousand Americans killed in the venture.
The episode in Afghanistan when a foot-ball player soldier (Pat Tillman), was killed by friendly fire when there were not even any Talibans around, also comes to mind. For they wanted to portray the event as the death of a foot-ball hero who sacrificed himself to save his comrades. And it got within literally minutes before the announcement by Bush-2 on national TV was stopped in time.
Perhaps upper echelon arrogance could even be tolerable if it did not reflect on the soldiery. C. Manning’s video of the soldiers on the helicopter over Baghdad, laughing as they were killing civilians in the square below. “Kill those bastards..,” is an example.
The US military is a great opportunity for graft to the tune of millions and billions (not for the foot soldier, of course). There is no control on costs, or auditing of expenses.
A group of three soldiers sent (illegally) to Milan to kidnap an Egyptian Imam, spent in 3 days over 200,000 dollars in extravagant expenses in Venice.
I don’t know how Russia staffs the army, whether by conscription or other. However, in the US, many join because there are no better employment opportunities and many to get a free college education.
Among these I rate the military-trained medical doctors as the most dangerous (for their patients). Arrogance is deadly in medicine, for obvious reasons.
In War and Peace a humble cannon gunner, holds his position to the very last moment, thus saving the situation in one of the battles with Napoleon. His superior blames him for having lost the cannon. Whereupon an officer intervenes to explain that it was the gunner’s bravery that saved the day. The episode, in my view, is symbolic of the Russian army spirit, as shown most recently by the hero near Palmyra in Syria
The general impression is that US soldiers, by and large, consider the army as an employment opportunity. If they consider how the Veterans are cared for, it would be hard for most of them to feel the dedication to the country that seems to be found in the Russian army.

Some, upon inquiry with the working class discharged NCO one can find all over the country, may come to believe that most US soldiers sense that they are badly led by officers and pols in whom they see no loyalty, and worse! that they are used for Policy that actually undermines their own collective interests – and thus the unspoken social contract of mutual obligations that creates a natio, a nation of unified peoples, has for America gone – poof! Betrayal does this. It means, some say, that the State is in collapse. Russia does not have this problem, but the USSR may have…huuummmmm….

When it comes to military matters, Russia has a huge advantage of having its’ “military industrial complex” entirely owned by the government. Therefore it is entirely impossible that an expensive but essentially inferior piece of equipment will ever be produced. No lobbying, no warmongering, and all designs are actually designed to perform, not to bring profits.

All that US has left is a well-oiled PR machine. American Dream has turned into American Nightmare long ago but the population has been brainwashed not to notice.

There is a saying in Serbian which portrays what you were trying to say about the Russian Armed Forces very nicely: “Бој не бије свијетло оружје, већ бој бије срце у јунака.” “Battles are not fought with bright arms, but by the hearts of heroes.”

The U.S military is a brilliantly constructed racket for fleecing American taxpayers, its not designed to fight or win wars with a well armed and motivated adversary capable of fighting back on an equal footing.

The entirety of American military planning is filled with buzzwords such as ‘A2/AD’ ‘Super Stealth’ and ‘Third Offset’ and is utterly obsessed with technological prowess and superiority as if this alone is all that is required to fight a near peer adversary like Russia or China.

This approach, designed specifically to instil fear in an enemy, is based on threat and intimidation in the hope that the said enemy is sufficiently fearful of this technological prowess and physical size to want to avoid war at any cost.

Actually this highly effective approach has been used before in the 1939 film with Judy Garland called ‘The Wizard of Oz’ where, when Toto the dog pulled back the curtain to reveal, instead of a fearsome monster, a middle aged man using a variety of steam driven machinery to metaphorically ‘blow smoke out of his ass’ so as to instil fear and threat and to maintain his position.

This is the modern American military, the Wizard of Oz, to blow smoke out of their ass for the purpose of intimidation.

This is necessary for America because any real war, that is a non nuclear shooting war with Russia or China, would entail losses, grievous losses, losses of men and equipment on a scale with Gettysburg.

Worse, the deaths of those American servicemen would be ghastly, crushed, drowned, burned alive, dismembered, and very likely all played out Live on Fox News. CNN and RT.

And here is the rub, those deaths, numbering as they would in the tens if not hundred of thousands, would play out very very badly across the American cultural landscape, divided and polarised as it is, perhaps more so now than at any other time in its short history.

The size and effectiveness of the American military is irrelevant, what will matter when the shooting starts, is how the American people deal with the loss of hundred of thousands of their servicemen being thrown onto Russian bayonets on the other side of the world to further some vague political dogma.

For the last 50 years the US military doctrine is not to throw land forces against anyone.

They strike with Cruise Missiles and Bombers.

They have no strategy to fight Russia. They have a first strike with nukes strategy that simply cannot be launched without total devastation of the entire world, especially the West. Russia holds the decisive edge with its triad of strategic and tactical nukes.

So, this great war that some folks imagine cannot be fought.

Even launching the vassals in NATO, the frontline fools from the Baltics and East Europe will be resolved in hours. The Russians would decimate any attack on the Russian borders. We saw that in 2014 in the Southern Boiler.
Ukies lost two armored brigades in 5 minutes of GRADS striking their formations.

Rest easy about WWII style war across a large theater battle space.

But the worst case of nuclear use is very real.
The US ideologues who hate Russia are still trying to model and game play a solution to a “first strike” that is total and one-sided in their favor.

Well, Larchmonter445, I don’t share totally that view. The US is protected by two oceans, on eastern part is also Europe. Why should they wanting a nuclear attack when such an action will inevitably lead to a similar attack by Russia ?

[Turgidson advocates a further nuclear attack to prevent a Soviet response to Ripper’s attack]

General “Buck” Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.

I would like to add that the Russian MoD has a doctrine and elaborate system in place for their strategic nuclear forces, called the ‘Dead Hand’, where even in the event that U.S./NATO launch a pre-emptive first-strike decapitation strike with nukes, and top leadership and command and control are wiped out; all of Russia’s ICBM’s and sub based Nukes would be launched immediately and independent of central or top authority.

I have to agree sAker. The US army relies on their hi tek stuff to do one thing & one thing only – apart from generating massive profits for the MIC – and that is to minimise US casualties. If / when a hot war breaks out it will get up close & personal PDQ. And instead of fighting lightly armed popular forces, usually at a time & place of the US Armys own choosing & on their terms, they will be fighting highly trained & HIGHLY motivated soldiers defending their country. They will know exactly what is at stake whereas the US soldiers motivation is I believe, much more amorphous with their actual homeland thousands of miles away. Casualties are going to be much, much higher than any American Army has seen in 70 years. I don’t think they will be able to “hack it” psychologically whenb things get nasty. That is where Russia will have the edge.

The next worrisome technology, whom countries like The British, US, Japan, and Israel are obsessed with is robot soldiers and hybrid man (by manipulating human DNA just like their GMOs) in order to annhilate humanity. I

believe that Putin and Russia have god’s support to create a stable world. Nations should be behind Russia/Putin.

However, whatever what Trump says, Putin must be very cautious. Who ever comes in the white house, they give the impression they are different from their past predecessors but surly, they end up having same policies. Let us hope Trump if sincere, his real policies will start to be visible not right away but in two years time.
We have to make sure Trump’s public relation is not an act.

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, I would say that beyond the military aspect (on which I am not an expert) Russia is indeed the most powerful country in the world, or will very soon be. Even though no material, easily quantifiable measure points towards this direction, “power” is more nuanced than raw GDP numbers, population numbers or stock-market capitalization. Even though these metrics are very useful when comparing “normal” countries, they are totally misleading when it comes to Russia, an “abnormal” country if there ever was one. Much of what is said in the Western MSM in order to highlight Russian weakness, are in fact strengths if one understands Russia’s peculiar and unique position in the global system.

a) GDP numbers are endlessly quoted by Russia-haters in order to soothe their frustration and anger over NATO’s failure to subdue the country. It’s as if quoting Russian GDP numbers will somehow confer victory to NATO and the final destruction of Russia. GDP (and other economic metrics) are very good when comparing countries with similar characteristics, social structures and geographical features. It’s very useful when comparing Germany to France or the UK. It’s also useful when comparing India to China, or China to the US and so on, even though the similarities here less obvious. But Russia is a totally different animal. Unlike the US or China, Russia doesn’t need a $20T annual GDP to be a superpower.

b) The reasons for this are quite numerous. First of all, Russia can buy social and political stability with far less than that, firstly because the Russian population is much smaller to that of the US (let alone China) and also the expectations are significantly lower than in the pampered West.

c) Russia can have an economy without being an exporter of industrial (consumer or capital goods) products over which there is cutthroat competition on a planetary scale. Russia only needs to corner the energy markets a little bit, and that’s it. This process is well underway by now.

d) Being a very low cost producer of both oil and natural gas, allows Russia to have very profitable corporations and be able to afford low tax rates. The reason why the West is so desperate to sabotage the Russian economy, is precisely because otherwise, Western corporations would simply flock to Russia, not only due to the favorable tax regime, but also due to low energy costs as well as low labor costs. The sanctions against Russia did not start in 2014, they were always there, they only became publicly official in 2014.

e) With indigenous European gas production in decline, there’s great scope for Russia to further boost its grip over the EU gas market. From 2020 (or perhaps earlier) Norway’s production will begin to plummet, further accelerating this process.

f) As I predicted 2 and a half years ago, Russia would come out on top in the oil price war. Even though initially Russia was the hardest hit, because the government did the right thing and allowed monetary policy to freely adjust to the new conditions, it has now become apparent that Russia is the winner. After a mere two years of low oil prices, the Saudis have been forced to cut back their production as they were bleeding their (still massive, but rapidly depleting) FX reserves, since unlike Russia, they cannot afford to allow for the devaluation of their currency (they import everything, including food) The US oil industry is in even worse shape (despite the constant propaganda claims made in the MSM) their production has declined substantially from its early 2015 peak but far more importantly, its debt load has risen even further into nose-bleed territory. The debt installments will begin kicking-in from this year and stretch well into the next decade. The long-term trend is clearly downwards. When the oil war started, both Russia and KSA were producing around 10M bbl/day (and change) while the US was at 9M + (and rising rapidly) Two years later, the Saudis have been forced to cut to less than 10M, US production is at less than 9M, while Russian production is at over 11M. Russia is therefore the clear winner in this battle as well. And all this despite the fact that Russia is much poorer than both the US & KSA in terms of finance an has also been under an oil equipment embargo (all designed to hurt Russian oil production)

g) Russia’s sheer geographic size, spanning from Europe to the Asian Far East, also affords Russia several strategic advantages (and soon to be, economic advantages as well) We like to accuse the US that they have military bases almost everywhere and that Russia only has bases on its own soil and a handful of other countries. This is absolutely true, but the fact of the matter, is that Russia’s immense size spanning Eurasia, allows her to have military installations from Kaliningrad (from where Europe can be threatened) to Karelia (where the Far East can be threatened) to Central Asia and the Arctic Circle. Russia may only have bases on its territory, but it’s a big-ass (and strategic) territory. On the economic level, Putin’s plan is to link the Westward-looking pipeline network to the newly built Eastward-looking network, so that Russia gas leverage can be increased over both East and West.

h) Russia’s smallish population is often sided as a devastating weakness (not least by the increasingly ludicrous Stratfor) But with Russia’s economic profile, having a smallish population is actually an asset, the revenues from mineral resource sales get to divided-up to fewer people. Moreover, while Stratfor like to present this as some kind of potential military weakness, this is utter nonsense. The era of millions-men armies such as in WWI and WWII, is well and truly over. In an ear of nukes, precision bombs, drones etc.. there’s simply no advantage to be had be sheer numbers of troops or armored divisions. While Russia can boast a surplus of land and resources, everyone else (China, India, Indonesia, IndoChina, Europe, Africa, the US, etc) are experiencing the opposite problem, and will be experiencing it more and more into the future.

i) All major countries on the planet are literally prisoners of their stock-markets/real-estate and other short-term and parasitic financial fluctuations. It’s enough for the stock-market or for housing to fall 10% in prices for their societies and political systems to go into nervous breakdown. This is a reality that constraints their options. Russia on the other hand, can go through a deep recession, a massive devaluation, a massive psychological warfare operation and COUNTER-ATTACK (!) the US-EU-ISR-GCC Axis! If that isn’t the purest display of power, then I don’t know what is.

j) All other major players on the globe have resorted to desperate monetary/fiscal measures in order to keep their economies going. From QE to ZIRP to NIRP to permanent fiscal deficits and so on… Only Russia has kept its capitalist cool (just like Morpheus says in the Matrix: “History, it seems is not without a sense of irony”) and has rolled with the punches of the global marketplace. Everyone else has been borrowing from tomorrow.

k) All other major players (including China) have discovered creative ways through which to waste lots of money on ludicrous energy projects. OK, on the one hand this acts as a state subsidy to local firms, but in the final analysis it’s an inefficient waste of resources. From useless windmills, to useless solar farms, to over-lending to the shale sector, to over-investing in LNG, to keeping loss-making coal mines alive they have all been postponing the inevitable.

GDP numbers are quoted because the strength of its economy also places certain limits on a country’s war fighting capabilities and what sort of war it can fight and for how long. This is because war needs money, literally black holes of money if the country is not careful. No money no fight. Period. That’s why there are so many ways to fight a war. Toe to toe may be macho but is only one of many ways and not the best way.

It’s interesting Saker also mentioned that China did not suffer a Soviet or US attack. The US attack was deterred in Korea. But subsequently China have two superpower enemies – the USSR and the US. But the USSR and the US were deadlier enemies of each other than with the Chinese although the USSR under Breshnev considered China as an even more deadly enemy than the US. But the US did not share this view but regard the USSR as more deadly an enemy than the Chinese. The Chinese knew this. That’s why Nixon was welcomed into China by Mao. At that time, the USSR was militarily more powerful than US-NATO in terms of armaments and numbers. My friend who visited the USSR was shocked with the impression that the whole population were virtually mobilised.

China became the balancer between the two. Whichever side China switched to will have the advantage just as now, the Russian-China partnership is a back-stop against US aggression. To be a balancer, China did not need to spend massively to modernise its forces – just good enough to restrain then USSR’s ‘Prussia-of-the-East’ Vietnam will do.

China did not start modernising its armed forces until after the imprudent 1996 US intervention over Taiwan. Until then, China’s military spending was insignificant. Also there was no longer an USSR to play against the US using diplomacy like in ancient times when using one barbarian to control another cost only a fraction of actually going to war against either or both of them. Thus China has no choice but to spend the money to modernise militarily if she is to retain any chances of taking back Taiwan and/or detering US aggression.

I’m not saying that GDP is not important or that it does not impose certain limits on any country, it clearly does. In fact, in the case of most countries around the world it maybe the only factor worth mentioning! I am only saying that Russia is an exception in this regard. Russia has much more under its sleeve than economic size etc…

And no, the Western MSM and experts are not quoting Russia’s GDP (in fact the smallest number they can find at any recent point in time) in order to make a rational appraisal of Russia’s true capabilities. They are quoting it in order to entertain their frustration, calm their nerves, soothe their pain and disappointment. It’s almost implicit in their statements that GDP numbers have already conferred victory to them.

What you say about Russia setting an example is true. Well, in my case at least. For a few years I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with the current civilisational model (and no that does not mean I am an extremist, as some would automatically assume) but had nothing else to look to. Russia’s gradual moves in opposing the US led model, and their victories in Syria as well as Ukraine have made me look to Russia more closely. I’m taking a greater interest in her history, and have also started to learn the Russian language. Russia remains a mystery to me, but I am sure it has much to offer the world. (I am Indian by the way, and depressed at how thoroughly we have capitulated to the Americans recently)

As for military superiority, especially importance of the foot soldiers. I once interacted with an Indian Army officer who served in the UN, and his assessment was that Russians make the best soldiers as they combine the Asian ideals of following orders and belief in something larger than themselves, with the Europeans’ ability to be independent, logical and creative.

With so many great comments I hesitate to add more, but this business of dying for one’s country is compelling to me.

When I was a child growing up in the years of “peace” following WWII in the west, the notion of dying in war was ever-present, in the memories of all the fallen, family talks about members now gone, etc. But as I grew up, my nation seemed not to be a country with morality and self esteem worth dying for, and there was no sense of my country even asking for this anyway, and no great sense of anyone’s wanting to do this.

In the 2-3 years since the Maidan, studying Russia and other fighters in the various conflicts, and videos of earlier conflicts such as Chechnya, Georgia and Afghanistan, I’ve been struck again and again by this notion of the willingness to die for the country.

I think what Saker and other commenters here say about the love of country being the greatest military force, is of utmost importance.

Studying Russia, I found myself longing to belong to a country with a noble core, to be proud of, and if necessary to die for – knowing that something good is left behind to make it all worth it. This feeling for country seems to have died in the west.

In references to SunTzu and the art of war that we see made, often overlooked is his first condition for victory, that the sovereign must be virtuous. This is what has drained out of the western countries, virtue. And without virtue, nothing remains worth giving your precious life for. But with virtue, one’s death is ennobled.

If you look at photos from the Second WW, you see soldiers from all armies thin in stature, with the minimum of burden from carrying all that crap modern American soldiers have. Neither do they look like Mr. Universe, all muscle. Back then, all they had was the shirt on their backs and the will to win. Same as the Islamist monsters fighting in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Very little resources, but determined to win the day.

A statistic that is very troubling is the suicide rate in the US armed forces (mostly it seems at the “grunt” or “makhra” level). To me that is another indication of the breakdown of American society and a significant one.

Also, high tech machines can be delicate, with high maintenance requirements, and, yes, they can do some functions others cannot but you need the tried and true equipment which can be fixed quickly and easily in the field. And they have different vulnerabilities . example from the latest
Hollywood remake in service of the US deep state: ( kidding)

Many points of general agreement, but “At the end of the day, the outcome of any war is decided by willpower” may be wishful thinking.

The outcome of an Nth conflict is determined by the disposition of forces at the commencement of hostilities. I believe Comrade Doctor Dugin has recently re-stated this principle of strategy.

Some may proffer the idea that will is a vital component of the disposition of forces, but one cannot argue the opposite, that disposition of forces creates will. Thus it is suggested that will is a single necessary feature, but also one insufficient to achieve victory by itself.

Is it the disposition of the forces at the commencement of hostilities, or is it the disposition of the population? I would argue that it is the disposition of the population which makes the difference. At the start of WW2 the disposition of the Russian forces was abysmal, yet they still won. Why, because of the disposition of their population, more pronounced in the population from the more eastern parts of Russia.

Will implies a choice, with disposition there is no choice, its in the dna from centuries of genetic selection for surviving hard lives with the barest minimum and constant warfare. And as one commentator above mentioned, Asians follow orders, period. So no will necessary.

Here ‘Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci says US sanctions against Russia have, in fact, united the nation around President Putin and his government, having the opposite effect to that desired by Washington, largely due to the toughness of “Russian culture.”‘ ‘”I think the Russians would eat snow if they had to survive. And so, for me, the sanctions probably galvanized the nation with the nation’s president”‘

He argues about the toughness of the Russian culture, I would say that its the toughness in the Russian dna. So there is toughness in both in the memes and in the genes of the Russian population. As another commentator above mentions ” Russia has much more under its sleeve than economic size etc…”

I am sorry – I thought the term “forces” might be misleading and I ought to have been less specific. It’s a discussion of Strategy and I assumed that it would be understood that in the modern way of these things, forces includes the population, all of the people. Of course, if the people are divided against themselves, as Empires seek to shape them, then their potential as “forces” is zero. The alignment of the people against their enemy may be thought of, I suppose, as “will”. It is surely identity as a National grouping. Anyway I am going to stay with the orthodox Dugin quote, or view.

I see the point taken that the leader must be virtuous. And I wish to aplaud!

Indeed, it is from virtue, one may expect, that “will-power” may grow. More interestingly, perhaps, is that from corruption we may expect to see a poor distribution of forces, and forces with little will beyond their own interests.

Geewhiz! The old one-twp whammy! It works both ways… Not so many soldiers will sacrifice themselves sock-puppet fakes, eh? Basic leadership 101, loyalty and virtue.

I read once that Russian special forces (Spetznaz?) new recruits ; as far as their final graduation, are dropped off in a far, very remote part of Siberia with nothing but the clothes on their backs; they are required to survive in the elements for 30 days. If they survive, they are accepted and graduate. If they don’t, oh well, they all knew the consequences and signed a paper saying that they know of this.

I agree with the Saker. Russia is un-conquerable. Simply because of the spirit, will and resolve of the Russian people, which is legendary.

If NATO/U.S. decide to get suicidal and silly, and attack Russia; it will remain a conventional war. Russia will repulse such an attack and go on the offensive. Russian airborne, armored divisions; covered by the best anti-air weapons in the world, would go straight to Lisbon and Paris within 4 weeks. The only thing that would slow them down is the condition of the shitty roads in Eastern Europe, but once they hit Western Europe, where the roads are great(see. Autobahn) its all over.

The Russian military is a cohesive force, while NATO is not, but a force of many countries and thus fragmented and unreliable.

If the west(U.S. , Britain and/or Israel ) decide to go for annihilation through nuclear means, Russia only has to detonate their nuclear arsenal on their own territory and the only living things left on Earth would be cockroaches. Their heavy ICBM’s don’t even need to be launched. That is why I say it will remain conventional.

God bless Russia and her Eastern Orthodox Church, and I hope the moderate Islamic world(overwhelming majority, not the brainwashed fanatics who somehow missed the big white elephant sitting in the living room-Israel, and decide to attack their own kind in Syria and Iraq; ridiculous btw, and they number in the thousands, while 1.7 billion Muslims know who the real enemy is) make an alliance that would blossom in the 21st century and put the evangelical western Christians and world Jewry(seems like the Hindus are allied with this groups as well, since they have an all-out hatred for all things Islamic; mostly because they have been messing around with Muslims and thus have been conquered and defeated, too many times to mention here, by Islamic armies for 1000+ years) to the camp of defeat and the dustbin of history. The Indian ruling nationalistic elite and upper classes have decided they love the western themed life styles and are following the U.S. and Israel right over the cliff, wholeheartedly. Bollywood is in love with Hollywood, so be it. And they get a few free drones from Israel too. Wow. They can take the flip-flopping , backstabbing Kurds with them.

Actually, Islamic eschatology and some verses in the Quran hint and vaguely tell of an alliance between the Eastern Orthodox Church(true Christianity) and the Islamic world, that would unite and defeat the sowers of discord on Earth. China, which is keeping the ‘Trojan horse’ India at bay, is welcome in this alliance.

The main story line of the 21st century will be about these two camps, in a multi-polar world.

While I appreciate this site precisely because it gets me to think in a different manner, I think your casual grouping of billions of people into ill defined, clashing, religious groups is too simplistic at best, and dangerous at worst. There is no clash of civilizations. That’s simply another way to divide and rule. I see you can differentiate between those that claim to act on behalf of Islam to murder their way to power, and the real Muslims, but not among the other religions of the world.

I am a Hindu by birth (more spiritual than religious, which by the way, is closer to the meaning of dharm. Not religion as the West understands/defines it). I do not have any antagonism towards Islam, either as a religion or from the cultural inputs it has had into the diverse, rich and ancient culture of India. Islamic armies didn’t ‘conquer’ India so much as India assimilated them. That outlook is precisely what the insecure ‘Hindu’ narrative is and you seem to be falling into the same trap, albeit with a different motive.

And while we’re at it, I don’t believe in condemning all the people of the West, or indeed their entire culture and history. The Western lifestyle does have its charms, and its lessons. Sure, some people follow what is told/sold to them blindly. Can you really blame them or indeed their religion? Besides, it’s not like they’ve had alternatives. Until recently, as Russia is now bringing itself to the world through having its voice heard. In political circles, and more importantly, in the news. It will eventually make a difference. (which is exactly why Russia created RT and why the mainstream media try to curb access to it or discredit it)

Western Civilization might have been led into a decline. No matter, that is a cyclical thing throughout history. They’ve had a relatively short cultural continuation anyway. It hides its flaws and its atrocities behind a thick layer of lies, deception and distortions. But it is not entirely evil, and neither are all the people living in it.

I just don’t agree with this idea of warring civilizations. That is never the real answer. Humans grow together, cultures integrate and evolve and change over time. You do not win by pitting one (set of) culture(s) against another. The Western leaders preach a lack of respect for other cultures. Let’s not do the same thing.

Yours are about the most pragmatic points of view I’ve ever heard from an Indian Hindu.

Look, I’ve been around the blog-o-sphere for quite some time now. And 99% of the time I hear Hindu’s rant about how they want to wipe out Pakistan. About using Afghanistan to weaken Pakistan(and I’m not Pakistani, btw). Usually very zealous about making their point. Sikh’s have sworn Muslims as their eternal enemies with no compromise there. Hindu’s and Muslims in India don’t seem to get along, with tit-for-tat attacks on religious shrines and places of worship, with mostly Muslims on the receiving end of these attacks. India’s subjugation of Kashmir seems to be identical to Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinian’s.

The ideologies of the majority of Jews and Christian Zionists(and I’m talking about the ‘bible belt’ in the U.S.) are both running the show in the elite circle of power in the U.S.; these people insist, and continue to push for a war of annihilation on Arabs and increasingly Muslims. And they are in the process of carrying this out. Just pay attention. The signs are everywhere. Take for example, in 2015, the U.S. dropped 23,144 bombs on majority Muslim countries. Its insane, but all calculated.

It seems the upper crust, ruling nationalistic Hindu elite of India have bought on to this nefarious design. Everything India has been doing lately shows this. In essence, India missed a great opportunity to do otherwise and ally itself with her neighbor’s and the vast societies of Muslims around her, as well as with China. Instead of being humble, and work a little harder to bury the hatchet with said peoples, India has instead wholeheartedly embraced the Jews and Christian Zionist’s. To her determent long term. They seek to use India, and what does India get in return? A bunch of call-centers and a few weapons and money sent back from the diaspora in the west . Hardly a trade off. Meanwhile India is suffering a ‘brain-drain’ in that her educated class is moving to the west. The majority of doctors in U.S. hospitals are Indian. India stands to lose out on the One Road-One Belt initiative, among other lucrative schemes.

Oh, things are shaping up to be a clash of civilizations. Believe it. And the ones pushing for it are Washington and Tel Aviv. Sad to see India buying into the wrong horse in this race.

Yes, I agree that there are great things about western culture, as I have been brought up in the U.S. , but it seems no one is to blame but themselves for not educating themselves, for the betterment of civilization in general. Instead, western societies and Indian Hindu society, by and large, want to simply look the other way or support war and clash.

Maybe someday, Indian Hindu’s and Muslims(maybe the Organization of Islamic Countries-OIC) can sit at the peace table and work out a long term treaty. Maybe.

I thank you for your reply. I do try to be as diplomatic as possible even though too many of my racial brothers and co-religionists are being killed, maimed and displaced everyday. Salam.

Thank you for your response. I do agree with a lot of what you say. But I promise you, despite the presence of motivated crazies and paid trolls online and in the bought off media, what they seek to make you believe is not the real India where this Hindu-Muslim ‘divide’ is concerned. It is artificial. Politics uses it as a way to divide us. People do still feel alienated or separate from the other (mostly through lack of education and knowledge) but there isn’t anything like a true Hindu-Muslim divide. No real antagonism. Culturally, if I may be so bold as to say, I see very little difference in the Muslims or the Hindus of India. Their dharm is essentially the same. They only practice a different religion. (There are many differences within ‘Hinduism’ too)

As far as other things go. You are correct. India sold out to the US. We’ve become their vassals politically since this new govt came in on the back of a sustained 4 year media campaign demonising the previous govt on charges of corruption. (Not all untrue, but the purpose of the campaign was to smear them precisely because they refused to sell out) Our institutions are being demolished or co-opted by someone who in essence is a dictator. And the majority of the public don’t seem to realise this. How could they? They’ve never been exposed to another worldview. All our media is either controlled by, or picks its contents from the West.

But what you hear of the voices of India, is only a very small minority. The rest of the nation prefers to keep its counsel because there is a fear of persecution for speaking out. (or because they have other more immediate things to occupy them) But more and more people are doing it and even the media has to report some of it.

At times I despair of what is happening in India, but I still do believe that our civilisation is diverse, and flexible enough to survive and reinvent. We are not natural allies of the US. We have known this even since the days of Nehru (and other Western educated elites who formed the govt) and the Non Aligned Movement. After all, even the right wing crazies you hear talk about Pakistan and Muslims in that manner, also talk of not aping the West. They believe in our cultural superiority (and make ridiculous claims to do so, but whatever)

My point is, I think the Indian public will not abandon the US dream easily. But in time, presented with an alternative, I think we’re more natural allies of Russia (with whom we’ve had a friendly history) China might be a problem though because I think most Indians fear China (even if they don’t say so) Probably because of the 1962 debacle. They also dislike the Chinese support for Pakistani terrorism.

The Kashmir issue. I think you are wrong to equate it with Israeli occupation of Palestine, but India certainly needs to do more and be more sensitive to the plight of the Kashmiris rather than just resort to jingoism.

The most saddest part about what you said is that the ‘media is controlled by the west, or uses MSM content from the west…’. That in of itself spells trouble for Indians in the short, medium and long term. Indians are in for a scary ride, complete with LGBT pride parades in New Delhi etc. and market shocks( old Jewish shell-game) coming soon. All we can do is hope for the best. Whatever religion you are.

Meanwhile, China is building mega-metropolises. An infrastructure beyond belief. From what I hear, thousands of Indian farmers commit suicide every year because they cant feed their families.

Mind you, The Islamic world is in deep trouble too. As we lack in cohesiveness and guiding, righteous leadership. But that’s another story.

@bored muslim: I don’t have time to write a detailed response regarding Kashmir, but I would recommend that you read the perspective of Kashmiri Hindus at http://www.ikashmir.net

@Anonymous: I don’t agree that India has sold out to the West. I admit, it does look that way, but India is being extremely careful to keep its distance and maintain its strategic autonomy. Just read the fine print of LEMOA. Also, this article is worth reading (though not entirely accurate):http://theduran.com/modi-washington-india-will-not-become-us-ally/

Throw your mind back to 2010 and the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. The whole issue of corruption (started in the British media with the Queen’s baton, and award of the games portrayed as corrupt), the Anna Hazare movement, the subsequent created controversies by the CAG and the then Army General, the blocking of the functioning of the parliament over issues like the Goods and Services Tax and FDI investments (both of which are now treated as modernising tools of this govt) and the media hysteria around the falling rupee (higher than it is today when oil prices were at well over $100 a barrel. Sometimes $130)

Now, also think how Modi’s image and history of the Gujarat riots (something he has not and cannot apologise for because both his detractors and his supporters would finish him) and how the media normalised him. How the West went from publishing stories about refusing visas to him, to the UK ambassador visiting Gujarat and praising the ‘Gujarat model’ to the heavens. A Gujarat Model which was only based on hype and false statistics, aligned with dictatorial control and misuse of state power (the anti terror squad stalking the woman – which the media only covered as a women’s rights issue rather than an abuse of power issue, and of course the extrajudicial killings) All social indicators show a decline in Gujarat.

And even more importantly, the public mood. In 2010, we Indians were full of hope and energy. If the USA can do something why can’t we? If China can build something, why can’t we? If Australia can win Olympic golds, why can’t we? We must. All that energy was destroyed by the noise around corruption. Now we’re led to believe we’re all useless and Modi has come in to save us. (A gift from God his own ministers call him) Essentially we were told to stop all progress because corruption is a by product of progress.

And in my reckoning, this came about to contain an increasingly assertive India on the global stage. Especially after they thought they had co-opted India with the Nuclear deal only to see the contracts go to France and Russia instead of the US. India must remain tied up with Pakistan. How else can they play us off each other using the ‘nuclear powered neighbours’ line to keep up the fear. (A nuclear capability that they helped build in Pakistan)

And now, Modi’s first action was to go to the US, come back and raise pharma prices by 30%. The defense procurement policy has been changed to be able to buy even at 150% higher than the lowest price (because US can’t compete on price) and simultaneously the media (and our old friend the CAG’s office maligns Russian planes and systems) Giving the US Air Force access to fly around the Himalayas to recover the body of a World War 2 soldier. Giving MIT contracts to map the interiors of the country for interlinking of rivers. They are talking about the education policy being changed to have all engineering degrees to be subject to a common exam (Pearson and McgrawHill will love it) And above all, the destruction of India’s cash economy to bring everyone under the ambit of their banking system. A system designed to feed on the poor.

Whatever the official policy may remain on paper, I am afraid India has sold out, our institutions are being destroyed by a dictator, and we know the US loves dealing with those. All this with the media turning a blind eye, or indeed cheering it on.

One thing that is not clear to me is that if you have become powerful/wealthy through Western corporation like India and China were, can they be their own nation? Meaning, how can they challenge the West today after they have economically progressed through the open trade of the West?

India must reform itself and get rid of this caste system and having untouchables, so that it won’t be easily divided by outsiders. That is the starting point.

I am very doubtful that you can envisage a true alliance between Orthodox and Islam as long as Islam retains its adversarial view towards the central beliefs of Orthodoxy: that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, the Word who was God, became flesh and lived among us, died on the Cross, rose from the dead and ascended to Heaven.
As long as the eschatology of Islam retains the view that Christ would come again on Earth (at Damascus!) as a subordinate of the Mahdi, to ‘testify against those who had called him son of God, the Christians, and those who had belied him, the Jews’, to ‘break the cross, kill swine, and abolish jizyah’ and establish Sharia throughout the entire world.

( Holy Quran ) : ‘ Be righteous and act justly with those that worship another God’ (60 : 8)

We Muslims believe in Allah (God; btw, Arab Christians also call God, Allah), the holy spirit, Jesus as a prophet and messenger and Mary as a virgin saint. She will be one of the first 4 women to enter paradise, no questions asked. We also believe Jesus never died and resides in paradise next to God awaiting his second coming. Jesus will be subordinate to no one, not even a Mehdi. That’s a minority point of view.

Given these beliefs, they are not all that alien to Christian Orthodoxy, and I do believe sincerely that a accommodation of views can be reached mutually beneficial theologically for both faiths. I do believe this will happen.

Perhaps even in the future, I believe the Islamic world should give back the Sofia Cathedral/Church in Istanbul back to the Orthodox Church.

Its only natural it seems for this to be a reality. And things are moving in this direction.

Good. That should be the Islam who might aspire to an alliance. Discard explicitly all anti-Christian passages of the Quran, Hadiths, commenters and apologists, denounce unequivocally all the ‘eschatology’ (which I summarized above) which inspired and feeds the present jihad (Malham), renounce any idea of the Caliphate and imposition of Sharia Law, put an end to the desecration of Hagia Sophia by returning it unconditionally to its rightful owners, make clear that although some beliefs of Islam about Christ are ‘not that alien to Christian Orthodoxy’, they are NOT the same. Realize that Christians would never accept that Muhammad is a greater prophet that Jesus Christ and Christians have nothing to learn from Islam. Only then an ‘accommodation’ could occur.

As for the ‘insight’ which might be obtained from Sura 5, there is nothing very encouraging:

51 “O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.”
So you see those in whose hearts is disease hastening into [association with] them, saying, 52 “We are afraid a misfortune may strike us.” But perhaps Allah will bring conquest or a decision from Him, and they will become, over what they have been concealing within themselves, regretful.
57 “O you who have believed, take not those who have taken your religion in ridicule and amusement among the ones who were given the Scripture before you nor the disbelievers as allies. And fear Allah , if you should [truly] be believers.”
73 “They have certainly disbelieved who say, ” Allah is the third of three.” And there is no god except one God. And if they do not desist from what they are saying, there will surely afflict the disbelievers among them a painful punishment.”
83 “You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers [to be] the Jews and those who associate others with Allah; and you will find the nearest of them in affection to the believers those who say, “We are Nasara.” That is because among them are priests and monks and because they are not arrogant.” The al-Nasara are NOT the Orthodox Christians, however much the genial Sheik Imran Hossein strives to make you believe, but a Judeo-Christian heresy, the Nazarens.

They have been colonized for 600 years by the West so you can’t blame them. Let us not forget, Pakistan was once Indian and Hindu until the interference of the colonizers; the only way to divide this land is by creating strife among Indians. To weaken India which was once a great civilization and does not believe in violence, is by introducing Islam which eventually lead to the break-up of India into Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. By the way, what made easier to colonize India by a tiny Great Britain Island is because of their non violence beliefs.

As for Muslims,

Muslims also themselves have been the victim of the Ottoman. In reality, the Middle East of today was once secular where Muslims, Christians, indigenous were tolerant of one another and live side by side and continued to thrive and could have continued their great civilization without the Ottoman and later Western colonization. This Islam fundamentalism and increasing of Muslim population by force (using sword, economic suppression) like the Wahabists of today, lead to less progress of the ME. By boggling the ME in religious fundamentalism gave colonizers to progress and promote suppression of the ME. In reality, Islam has always been used to create empire like the Ottoman and the emergence of Wahabism that might lead to the creation of its own empire. Of course, the West always backs this like they did with the Ottoman and today they ally themselves with the Wahabists of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. There is resurgence of the new Ottoman today via Gullen movement and Erdogon until he was double-crossed by the U.S which now he seems to ally himself with Russia. Turkey is being offered by nations left and right due to its strategic positions. It is being offered to take over part of Northern Syria, control over Cyprus, Oil pipe that is planning with Russia.

Western media sources often play too much into their own fantasy that the Russian military is ‘outdated’, when in fact its technology in certain spheres has far outpaced countries like the UK. In terms of naval power, I would still give the US an advantage, but this is relatively negligible for as long as nuclear weapons are deployable.

Informative and well thought out. The US “defence” budget is astronomical indeed; fed as it is by the Federal Reserve scam, and the considerable bonus afforded by enjoying the privilege of possessing the global Reserve Currency. I would expect Russia to spend more were it to enjoy the same advantage. It remains true though that the US’ military mission is corrupted and this affects morale. So much today is illusory; a story to divide people and incite them to hate. But are the “opposing Governments” really divided as well? Moscow and Denver: The difference?

I take your point, however immense firepower of us military can surely do a lot of damage. It is clearly not able/willing to establish order in occupied territories but it can clearly destroy.

for example, they have so many cruise missiles that they can destroy anyplace they want by simply saturating the defense systems, rendering any defensive posture ineffective. Does Russian military have anything that could counter such an attack?

I did not talk to many US soldiers, but, invariably they consider what US does as for the good, so they also believe in whatever mission they would have to do. I think you underestimate the power of propaganda that is poured into the throats of their soldiers

My late father in law was telling us the stories from the WW2. He was located in Innsbruck / southwest part of the Austria/ and working as a technician on the army base.
He told us that the US soldiers refused to go to the combat till they haven’t had a warm water shower, clean socks and hot chocolate for the breakfast. It was a must!
Russian soldiers came totally exhausted, dirty,hungry sleeping on the trees before they have arrived, they have washed themselves in the near spring had some very little food prepared by the local volunteers and immediately went back to the combat to fight the Germans.
I don’t know how it is now, but definitely Russians are extremely tough and responsible to bring the justice and end the war as soon as they can.
I hope that the moral of the Russian soldiers are still the same and they were raised in these lines to be competitive.

From the US perspective, the US military is beset by a legion of traitors. Yes, traitors. And no, I’m not referring to the Mannings or the Snowdens of recent years. I’m referring to the serving officers and defense contractors who put their desire to grab as much of the public purse over the need to defend the country.

It begins with serving officers. Ones who are nearing their 20 year retirement from the military, and who’ve already aligned themselves with a defense contractor. In exchange for helping the defense contractor grab taxpayer dollars, the officer is guaranteed a very well paying and easy job for when they get out of the military.

It begins with the requirements for a weapons system. First, the Request for Proposals is already rigged. If a particular defense contractor is good at doing X, then they’ll have their already aligned serving officers make sure that X is defined as a key criteria for the weapons system. It doesn’t matter whether X is really a critical need or now, just that their defense contractor get the contract.

The second part of this is that the requirements for every system is that it do everything. This makes the weapons both very expensive (what the defense contractor wants) and is why in the end they really don’t do anything very well. The F-35 is an example. Its requirements were set for it to do everything. Its supposed to be an air superiority fighter. Its supposed to be a ground attack fighter. Not only is it supposed to do both for the USAF, but it also is supposed to do both for the USN. Its also supposed to be a naval strike plane. Its supposed to fly from airfields. Its supposed to be able to take off and land from a carrier.

This leads to a very expensive weapon that only one or two defense contractors could possibly build.

For the sake of Congress, the initial price is low-balled. But then, the changes and the cost overruns begin. And the price goes up and up and up. All to the joy of the defense contractor who’s watching public money flow in and make them rich.

Finally, the serving officers are then expected to sign off on the weapons system actually passing tests that say it can do everything. Again, these are officers who are already looking forward to working for the defense contractor within a year or so. And of course, they put their personal well-being ahead of the country and and dutifully sign off on the tests.

By this point, its becoming controversial. So, the bought and paid (by the defense contractor) congress people insist on ordering more of the weapons than the Pentagon has finally decided that they need.

This happens over and over again. I can’t think of a defense contract for a weapon that has been well-thought out, well designed and that works properly when it comes off th eline. Not for decades.

The US military is beset by traitors who put profits and personal self-interest ahead of serving the nation.

Years ago a pal did contract “work” for the US Army…basically he went in to the base every day and just simply screwed around. In 1990 he got paid about 16 bucks an hour for sleeping, finding stuff, riding a bicycle, reading cheap western novels. This was called “maintenance”, and there were “duties”, but so trivial as to be irrelevant. He was a pawn. Everybody was, and all knew. it was a bs game to get the money. The contractor hauled in 600 million a year with zero investment – every single bit of the property involved belonged to the State. After pay-out they kept 100 million – according to the numbers they bragged about.

Its interesting that the force that led the Soviet(might as well just call them Russians and ethnically Muslim Russian countrymen. Probably Chechens, since they have always have been used as ‘shock troops’ since the days of the Czars. The 154th Separate Spetsnaz Battalion. Or the ‘Muslim Battalion’.

This article tells you just how effective and efficient the Russians Federation is. In all statecraft and the art of war.

Those a bit older would remember one of “Delta Force’s” (1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, one of the U.S. special missions units primarily focused on the counter-terrorism mission) first missions:

“Operation Eagle Claw (Persian: عملیات طبس‎‎) (or Operation Evening Light or Operation Rice Bowl) was a United States Armed Forces operation ordered by US President Jimmy Carter to attempt to end the Iran hostage crisis by rescuing 52 embassy staff held captive at the Embassy of the United States, Tehran on 24 April 1980. Its failure, and the humiliating public debacle that ensued, damaged US prestige worldwide. Carter himself blamed his loss in the 1980 US presidential election mainly on his failure to win the release of U.S. hostages held captive in Iran”.

To my knowledge, there was no Hollywood film. I remember a documentary made by BBC in 2006: “Iran Hostage Rescue” in the series “Surviving Disaster”. There was also an American docu-drama “Operation Eagle Claw” in a series on “When Weather Changed History”.
There was instead an Iranian film “Sand Storm” (Persian: توفان شن‎‎), directed by Javad Shamaghdari made in 1997.

But Russia has shown herself _both in Donna and syria _ to be stopping whenever victory was at hand for cease-fire to please their sngloamerican enemies.
That is fatal mistake to covert a almost won war into a frozen confluct.
So russia can be chided by even a 4th grade power in Europe.

There’s a great quote, something to the effect of “It is better to have an army of lambs led by a lion, than an army of lions led by a lamb”. Most American military personnel and veterans would readily admit that since WW II (and arguably, even then) US civilian political leadership is most definitely of the lamb variety.

The low opinion some native forces have of American troops is probably indicative of the incredibly inept and foolish political leadership they suffer under. As an example, American troops are not allowed to shoot at the enemy if there are civilians in the line of fire. The enemy knows this and will run away into a crowd where the Americans won’t shoot at them. The French Foreign Legion, in contrast, practices shooting into crowds.

Beginning in the Korean War, through the Vietnam War, and up to today, the American tradition “civilian control of the military” has escalated to complete absurdity. Untrained civilians have taken an increasing role in direct operational control of military units in the field, all the way down to the small unit level in certain instances.

In Korea President Truman rejected the advice of his Generals and the war quickly became a stalemate.

In Vietnam President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara commanded the war from Washington, D.C. all the way down to scheduling air sorties (which at some times they did as a “milk run” – exactly the same time every day, on the same route, over the strenuous objections of military commanders).

Under Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld personally intervened and cut the military police battalions the General requested, on the grounds that they were too expensive and unnecessary. Then, after the successful invasion there were no trained assets to maintain order in Iraq (which is why the General wanted the battalions) and Iraq quickly descended into civil disorder. Saddam’s armories were looted and the US troops found themselves facing a well-armed guerrilla force. But hey – Rumsfeld saved a few dollars up front by cutting those police battalions!

Also in Iraq and Afghanistan US forces operated under restrictive “rules of engagement” written by lawyers who had never fired a gun. There were times when soldiers could not engage the enemy without explicit permission from Washington. One story in particular that stands out was a funeral where a large number of senior Taliban commanders were in attendance – a beautiful and significant target of opportunity such as one rarely sees. The target acquisition team was there, there were aircraft standing by, as they requested permission all the way up the chain of command to someone in Washington, D.C. The person in the air conditioned office denied the request (bombing a funeral would look really, really bad on CNN), and so the funeral peacefully concluded and the Taliban command group dispersed to fight another day.

You cannot access a military outside a very specific set of circumstances:
1) Where: Space/geographical
2) When: Time/duration
3) What: political objective

While I agree with this concept, I must caution you Saker about projecting an impression of what constitutes a proper political objective.

If we look at just the facts, as you have so eloquently expressed them, the US military seems to be rather pathetic at achieving its prescribed political objectives…. however, one must also consider the ever present duplicity of their diplomats and politicians. A publicly stated objective is not necessarily the true objective. Especially where the USA is concerned.

If the true objective were, say, to sow chaos and terror across the globe, or to enrich the select few and assorted underlings via the MIC, or even just to slaughter as many innocent people as possible, then you would have to agree that the US military has done a sterling job over the last 70 years!

Given the increasingly incomprehensible imbecility emanating from Washington, we should be extremely wary of assuming what (if any) of their past, present, or future political objectives might be.

And that, I am afraid, renders your conclusion incorrect, if only due to a lack of data.

You can’t overlook that in most cases the political objectives set for the military are not achievable!

The Gulf War of 1990-91 was a notable exception: “Invade Iraq and force Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait without toppling his regime”. Simple; done in 4 days.

Contrast that mission with the Iraq War of 2004: “Invade Iraq, topple the regime, and then transform Iraq into Indiana”. The first two parts are clear enough, the last bit … not so much. It took as long as World War II, and when the US finally achieved some measure of success in stabilizing Iraq and installing a puppet regime Barack Obama surrendered it to Iran out of personal spite against George W. Bush.

A Congressman said, “I supported the war in Iraq, but had I known that after we won it Barack Obama would throw it away I would never have voted for it.”

Aha!You can’t overlook that in most cases the political objectives set for the military are not achievable!

An non-achievable political objective would either indicate a rather inept and inexperienced cabinet (highly likely given the country in question), or a PR cover for an entirely different objective (also highly likely given the same duplicitous country in question) !

I highly doubt there has been a more sinister and unconscionable empire in the annotated history of the recorded world. As and example, just today the history of the nature of the beast was rehashed on my feed with this:

They utilise, use, usurp, and abuse anyone and anything anywhere around the globe for petty power profit plays at home. They are willing to destroy countless lives (both foreign and friendly) for nothing more than a larger piece of an imaginary fiat pie, and illusionary stature in a mortal realm.

I’m Russian, though I have been living out of Russia for about 20 years, half of it in the U.S.
I speak from my own experience, a long one at that.
The main point here: if I were a foreign trooper, I would not venture against the Russian infantry in the open field. That is, never.

As one Russian politician put it: the Russians, with their silent tenacity, stubbornness, and resolve, proved to be undefeatable. I would largely agree. I will also add to that one other key factor that has determined the success of the Russian military in all prior wars.
To note, Russia and the USSR have won all the major wars since the establishment of the Russian State over 1000 years ago. That is, Russia defeated, crushed, and annihilated everyone and everything thrown at her in the course of its history. This is a hard fact, and there is a reason why.
Generally speaking, a Russian soldier (a soldier meaning anyone involved in a battle including the medics) gets mentally prepared to die in a battle to defend his/her family and the land, or the Motherland if you want. There is an element of fatalism in his/hers preparedness for the outcome. To put differently, these guys defy death by coming to a mental state of facing it without fear by accepting it as fate. Not everyone of course, but I would argue that the majority of them do.

This fact has been demonstrated multiple times: certainly during the World War II (that was one key reason why USSR, read the Soviet People, were able to completely dismantle the best war machine ever built in the history of humanity – The Nazi’s), and even recently in Syria when a Russian officer, coordinating strikes of the Russian Air Force, got surrounded by a formation of ISIS fighters blew himself and his enemies up with a hand grenade so as to not to get captured. This is an instance of real heroism that is common among the modern Russians, and their ancestors likewise.
Make a note of it. This gives Russia, as a unified force, an enormous strength and advantage against any possible enemy, unmatched by anything the NATO or anyone else can currently set against the russian thing that in the old times was called “the Warrior Spirit”; and it is in the Russian DNA. That’s the point that the Saker actually makes (I guess).

To conclude, the viewpoint made by the Saker is a valid one: it has both a theoretical explanation and some prior empirical evidence. I personally cannot go as far as to claim knowledge that the Russian Army is the most powerful one; simply because the traditional view of knowledge – as justified true belief (JTB) – has three key concepts: justification, truth and belief and we are lacking the Truth part here. The truth (i.e., the evidence) can only be established empirically, that is by practice (God forbids); however, given the arguments presented earlier, we do have legitimate reasons to believe it

Balov, I’m not challenging your conclusions but I’m afraid Russia didn’t win “all the major wars since the establishment of the Russian State over 1000 years ago.” The Russo-Japanese War is a case in point. It wasn’t fought to defend Russia from invasion though.

The end of the Saker’s great article is “And the TV watching crowd will be reassured that “while the Russians did make some progress, their forces are still a far cry from their western counterparts”. Who cares?” I do, because where I live a lot of people are brainwashed by American propaganda. The “TV watching crowd” is huge and is probably getting bigger. How depressing!

@TNY
Not to disagree with you, but what you said does not show the complete picture regarding the Russo-Japanese war. Please be informed that 1905 was the time of the first “revolution” in Russia, which affected Russian population extremely adversely. This revolution was shortly followed by the WWI and the “revolution” in 1917 which threw Russian into another continued struggle which lasted until ~1922. So to summarize, between 1905-1922 it’s hard to talk about any armed performance, but all that ended in 1945, when Russia (SU) regained everything it lost previously.

I understand your prevalent mood but I think you shouldn’t pay that much attention to the “TV watching crowd”. We can do without people taking to excrements, after all. I think the fate of the Ukros illustrates my point succinctly. They yearned really badly for “European values” and they got exactly that. Serves them right.

Thanks for your comment, but how can you not pay attention to the “TV watching crowd” when it is everywhere. A Ukrainian who never yearned for “European values” would feel pretty bad now, right?

Since Sun Tzu is mentioned in some comments let me quote him and ask a couple of questions for everyone who cares to read this comment. He said that it is best to subdue the enemy’s troops without fighting (my translation). So you may not need the best armed forces on the planet. For example, if the enemy is so brainwashed that they fear or worship you then it won’t fight you. The US is unmatched in soft power, unlike military power. Is this going to change soon? How do you go about challenging its soft power?

Although Russians are successful at war, it pays heavy price every time. Now Russia must invest to lessen this heavy price and must win the Media, Propaganda war that easily weakens and defeats enemies.

The series evaluates the “deadliness” of different warriors (their techniques and weapons) and then at the end runs a computer simulation to see who would win in direct combat. Many of the episodes feature matchups that would never happen, such as “Viking vs. Ninja” or “Nazi SS vs Viet Cong”.

This one is different because the two opposing warriors could (and might yet) in fact meet in battle.

The evaluation features “smack talk” which is a scripted part of the show. In my experience, “smack talk” is a sure indication of a coward, so I think it was unfortunate to include it here.

The upshot of the evaluation is that Russian Spetsnaz puts greater emphasis on training the individual. My personal favorite part is when the Spetsnaz soldier, Sonny, allows one of the hosts to punch him in the stomach. As he takes the punches without reacting, the host asks “Can’t you feel that?” and Sonny replies, of course he can, but one objective of Spetsnaz training is “build up a small tolerance for mayhem, and then you can ramp it up quite a bit”.

Disclaimer: As a former US Marine, I can assure you all that we were never impressed with the Green Berets (or, “Green Beanies” as we called them).

Once again. USA had maximum 540 000 soldiers in Vietnam but only 70 000 of them were combatants. And in reality not more than 40 000 could be sent to front line combat duties. That’s just 7.5% of all forces there. Nowadays things are even much more techno based (in Gulf War less than 5% of US forces were combat soldiers). The tail is absolutely too heavy – and expensive. There is one article suggesting USA has annually invested 20 billion dollars just to keep cooling system working for its troops in Afghanistan and Iraq (terrible lot of fuel have to transport in long distance basements) .

The hype of techno war has led generally in situation where e.g almost all European NATO countries has less artillery fire power than Finland has (Finland has not also undermined the armor). It’s not a joke to claim that typical European NATO country has more generals than artillery pieces. NATO itself is of course relic of past time which will never come back.

Hopefully Trump will be in measured control and won’t figure that war is better for business than peace, so this artical’s premice isn’t tested and proven. We’ll know soon enough now. But the way troops+gear are being thrown into Europe and jihadi’s renewed in Syria with Israel egging on the anti Assad terrorists, it’s a worry

Thank you for this informative essay. With your permission i pose the following as a means for further dialogue :

U.S. Gen Smedley Butler – “War is a racket.”
———————————————————-
Everything else flows from this statement. American bureaucracy, be it the pentagon, wall street corp, fed, etc is designed to grow their budget and expenditures. It’s about the piece of the pie. That is their unstated mission. Winning wars speedily means curtailing the budget soon after. Thats the stated mission, but no one adheres to that.

Vietnam War, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc are fiascos in the eye of the corporate media and the taxpayer. But to the governing elite, they are a deliberate maneuver to extract more money for the budget. It works everytime. The more the war drags on, the more money is spent.

Vetnam as an example – the war destroyed most of her infrastructure. Gen Curtis LeMay warned of this strategy. The war lasted a generation, while the bureaucracies and their suppliers in the US grew, and a select few got very wealthy.

Think spice trade, opium trade, heroin and cocaine trade, and perhaps we can appreciate colonialism never left us. The compradors and their descendents are left in charge of the colonies. When these got too big for their breeches, they are cut down to size – Iraq and Libya most recently.

I leave you with a one other topic for research – Custer’s last stand. It could just be one of the earliest “false flag” ops. Sacrifice a few to get what one wants. There were already indications before the battle at LBH that the tribes were massing for a battle. And yet, an inadequate forward force was left to perish.

My take on the US military is this – it is a superb force. Do not confuse its budget-busting designs(and foot dragging in small wars) as weakness. It is not. There is method in its madness, to paraphrase the Bard.

check out this latest tech from usa
“The US Army ‘Stormtrooper’ hoverbike that could soon ferry soldiers into battle takes to the air for the first time
US Army demonstrated flying capabilities of its ‘hoverbike’ earlier this month
Drone will be used to deliver supplies to soldiers on the battlefield
It will be able to fly low on the ground at 60mph and drop off supplies in 30mins
Researchers plan to increase its payload to carry 800lbs and add sensors
By Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com
PUBLISHED: 18:22, 18 January 2017 | UPDATED: 18:54, 18 January 2017

The US Army has demonstrated the capabilities of a ‘hoverbike’ that could one day deliver supplies to soldiers in war zones.

Hailed the ‘Amazon on the battlefield’, the joint tactical aerial resupply vehicle (JTARV) has been in the development stages since 2014 and proved itself to be a working prototype earlier this month.

Researchers are also working on technology that will help JTARV fly low to the ground at speeds of 60 miles per hour while delivering supplies within 30 minutes.”

meanwhile Uk says it can send tanks through channel tunnel to support Baltics ………it tested this with 5 tanks…apparently Whitehall is tactically trying to prevent any rapprochement between Trump and Putin…………………………

So basically they are good for some “special operation” like surveillance, where what matters is not the payload, but ability to get into needed place at needed time. Or maybe deliver some kinds of rare unique cargo, when price matters not and quantities are minimal.

However trying to make multicopters into the massive logistics backbone – is just another way to bleed budgets using trendy flashy buzzwords.
Which i heartily endorse.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t about controlling the country. They are about the military-industrial complex and MONEY, and keeping the drugs flowing. So your analysis is not totally accurate. Follow (Show me) the money and you will see what these “wars” are about…..
I see no strategical motives or planning to finish what they started after more than a decade. All they are doing is throwing good money after bad….bring the troops home and save that dough.

Considering that US is occupying force in my country, sometimes I catch myself thinking what will happen if our children have to engage in an open hostility or war against mighty neocon invader. I would not mind facing them myself and often I try to imagine what we will face then.

I would not mind myself engaging in war against any of these, never mind our kids, as we are all sick and tired of neocon stupid war against humanity. But I doubt that they will engage against us if we ask them to go home.

Ok, ok, Saker, I’ll give you what you got as right for the moment, but there is a new sheriff in town. If Trump can take over the money and how it is spent and keep us out of these regime change wars, Katie bar the door.

If the money is spent correctly, and our troops are used in a manner where they know with a certainty that they are fighting for the homeland, Katie bar the door. The problem is the “if.”

I had to laugh when you said something about ‘fighting for the homeland’ being a litmus test of some sort of martial virtue for the United States.
Ask Russians. They know that they are ‘fighting for the homeland’ when the West starts raping their women and burning down their houses.

If the Anglo-Zionist Empire adapted the same ‘litmus test’, wars would practically cease.
Why do Anglo-Zionists always insist on complicating things?

The funny thing here is that the Pindo garbage soldiery is fighting for their revered homeland to the hilt. The US was the template which Nazi Germany emulated: Permanent conquest, enslavement, rape, and genocide to achieve general prosperity and social cohesion for the benefit of hideously ugly, obese, flag-waving Exceptionals and Indispensables. Indeed, parasitic countries breed armies in their own image.

I did not read much as I don’t need ”convincing” or explaining…… besides Sun Tzu’s ”The Art of War” is used by Russia… it is supposed to be taught in USA’s military, if it is, they do not understand it and so don’t follow it…

I’d like to mention that one of the probably reasons the Iranian crisis several years ago was averted was that the Pentagon was aware Iran was equipped with Russian Sunburn missiles (3M-82 Moskit), at the time (and probably today as well) the most lethal anti-ship cruise missiles in the world. The Russians, very prudently, had invested in anti-ship rocket technology and, as a result, the hugely expensive, monster US aircraft carriers and other war ships had become hardly more than sitting ducks for these super fast (Mach 3) rockets, launchable from different, difficult-to-track platforms.

Thanks Saker and all commentators here for superb article and thread. I’ve been interested in so many of the topics discussed here, all the way back to Podcast #9 many moons ago. Mucho praise to the mods and posters for keeping things civil. As a recovering product of the American academic lower-middle class, I seem to remember military issues being considered below the standards of polite discussion. I.e., an anthropologist or historian will consider warfare to be some mysterious topic not worthy of proper intellectuals. How ridiculous. The Chinese and Russians consider the martial arts to be dignified and mental/spiritual, crucial topics rather than boondoggles. Chess and Go really are more dignified than Monopoly, and Bagua beats boxing, at the end of the day.

This seems to be a Western weakness toward Russia. I don’t know how the professional military approaches Russia, but in the Russians while considered demonic on one hand, are also thought of as militarily incompetent. Watch any of the early post-WWII war documentaries and the only reason the genius military of the Nazis didn’t bet the Russians was because of Hitler. Apparently, Hitler made every mistake in every battle. No credit is given to the Russian military leadership. The story of Stalingrad is the story of the 6th Army and Hitler’s mistakes rather than Chuikov’s defense.

Any damage – it defeated mistakes. Do not you think?
Look at the history of how many times the West Fix your predatory gaze into our territory? How many times he ran away back? And be sure and run away again. We will not attack, we will defend.

“Russia announces it has developed the next generation of weapons using plasma, lasers and electromagnetic forces and ‘physical principles never used before’
Russia is working on a new generation of laser, plasma and hypersonic weapons
Deputy Defence Minister Yuri Borisov said the future of warfare was about ‘detecting the enemy quicker’ and the winner won the battle….”

I am generally in agreement. NATO is still not capable of winning a conventional war with Russia. It might be able to achieve parity in ground forces and artillery on the front lines at some stage, but not in the near future. It faces disadvantages in submarines, air defenses, mechanized/armored forces, and conventional surface to surface and antiship missiles. NATO ground forces are also poorly coordinated and dispersed. NATO’s advantages in ships and aircraft would be countered by the Russians’ state of the art missiles and tactical aircraft. While the finance-capital order of the West is distasteful from my populist perspective, the Russians would, however, encounter difficulties in certain scenarios. The Baku oilfields, which served Russia’s advantage during WWII, are now controlled by an Azeri government with close ties to Tel Aviv, Washington, and Ankara. During WWII, Germany did not mobilize its economy for war until 1941. Ukraine has already fallen into the orbit of Washington. Although NATO is falling behind the state of the art in air power, large NATO air forces still pose a threat that ground based air defenses cannot protect against everywhere. A worst case scenario would be for NATO to fortify its front lines and enlist a majority of member states in a protracted conventional war with an isolated Russia, and mobilize early. If Russia failed to destroy NATO’s airlift and military engineering capabilities, and advanced deeply into NATO’s European territories early in a ground war, then NATO members’ overall greater productive capacity, and access to financing, would ultimately turn the balance against the Russians, notwithstanding the challenges of weather and the Russian terrain.

Russia has all necessary resources and industrial capabilities to win and most important capability to fight and win conventional wars… USA and NATO do not posses this capability. Bean counting won’t help you. God might but He is on Russian side.
Nazi Germany possessed industrial resources of the whole Europe and it failed despite having almost 40% of Russian population under occupation with industrial potential and resources.
Napoleon also had the whole Europe behind him. Now we have 2 greatest military machines of modern times failing against Russia led by military geniuses and you claim that patetic US military which never fought any peer can win long term? It would be unmitigated disaster for NATO and US to ever face Russia militarily.

This is a very good piece.
Russian soldier historically was tough, resilient, stoic, capable and accept destiny as it is.
The only other soldier who was capable of similar behavior was Roman one. I find lots of similarities between two.
American soldier might look big and tough but is soft on the inside. they would not last against either Soviet or modern Russian army. Even Germans at their peak failed.

It was not until post Napoleon era that science and war became partners. Fredric the Great once said he who defends everything defends nothing. Russia in WWII defended selectively as they did in 1812 and made the enemy pay the price.

I think he who attacks everything attacks nothing is also true. We can see the truth in this with Hitler, and present US military exploits around the world. Hitler paid the price for this and it seems America is paying the same price as they leapfrog from war to war all over the planet.

Military tactics changed over time due to technology . The war in the Atlantic was won using convoys against German U-boats which crippled the German ability to supply her industries with resources.

Static warfare gave way to movement of soldiers (Blitzkrieg) around fortress cities cutting them off from supplies and their command. The French failed to heed DeGaulle and his warnings about static warfare and they spent millions on the Maginot Line rather than modernizing their military.
Post WWII millions are spent on Robotics and nuclear weapons and their delivery. Note no one attack a country that has nukes.

Present tactics use economic and information to win wars. The best tactic against this is self reliance and many trading partners rather than few.

Hi all from Russia! =) I do not know much English and will be used to write a comment.
It is a pleasure to read such reviews of our army and Russia as a whole. It is evident that the author understands us. As to your comments I can see the truth. Thank you.
I want to mention one important point. We are not great warriors. We are the great defenders of our country. Our families. I believe in it.))
In my family for 7 generations, all the men were soldiers. And all had combat experience. These wars have a different type and nature. International, Civil, Domestic. As far as I know, we had to start the majority of conflicts. It would be nice to get along without wars. But it does not happen. War of the engine of the economy and technological progress. A lot of blood = a lot of money. Many tears = many iPhones. It’s true.
I want to believe that our world will be a demilitarized. Because if you have a weapon – it should be used. Our hunters have a saying – “uncharged rifle shoots once a year”

Great way to view Rus military: ” We are the great defenders of our country. Our families. I believe in it.”
One should also know that US military strategy is to maim and murder the families of the soldiers first.
US military policy since US president Lincoln has been:
“We are not fighting against enemy armies, but against an enemy people, both young and old, rich and poor, and they must feel the iron hand of war in the same way as organized armies.”

This is not really relevant to current conditions, but too interesting to pass up when relative military morale is being discussed. It is confidential report on the actual state of the US military (Army) in 1971 (Vietnam era), and quite an insight into why the draft was ended.

One of the old adages that came from WW1 was that When the English artillery fired, the Germans ducked for cover. When the German artillery fired the English and the Americans ducked, and when the Americans fired, everybody ducked. The adage didn’t alter in WW2, and in Vietnam where friends served with the Americans, what frightened the Australian soldiers was that their training taught them to engage the enemy when fired upon, but the Americans simply retreated and called in the artillery. Again on perimeter guard duty, with a ‘false alarm’ the Americans suffered three fatalities.
But what really frightens me is the simple fact that the Australian military are now accepting the second rate training and equipment of the Americans instead of following the age-old traditions of proper training and reliable equipment You’d have thought the tales of what happened to the Australian troops under ‘British’ control would not have been forgotten.
I would concur with ‘the Saker’

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